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firm—one that specializes in using the Internet to lobby—recruited scientists to write letters identifying flaws in the methods used to demonstrate genetic instability. On this basis, the editor of Nature did something highly unusual (if not unprecedented) in such scientific disputes. Stopping just short of calling the paper fraudulent, he published some of the critical letters along with an editorial note: “The evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper.” The researchers admitted some errors in methods, but reaffirmed their original conclusions.36

The public relations campaign also focused on the researchers’ politics. The senior author, Dr. Ignacio Chapela, held an untenured faculty appointment in the Berkeley plant biology department that auctioned itself into partnership with Novartis in 1998. Dr. Chapela had led faculty opposition to that partnership. Other faculty had accused his coauthor, a graduate student in that department, of antibiotechnology vandalism of their experimental crops (a charge he denied). Reporters investigating the matter guessed that Monsanto and other proindustry groups were behind the public relations campaign but were hiding that connection. Colleagues sympathetic to Dr. Chapela pointed out that most of the writers of the critical letters to Nature received all or part of their research funding from an institute affiliated with Novartis (by this time, Syngenta), but also had not disclosed their competing interests.37

In the furor over the paper and its near retraction, one crucial fact is easily overlooked: nobody challenged the observation of transgenes in native corn. Indeed, Mexican scientists soon confirmed traces of transgenes in up to 36% of samples tested.38 In this sense, the public relations campaign succeeded brilliantly. It focused attention on complicated scientific issues and deflected attention from the crucial social issue—the escape of genetically modified traits into wild plant stocks. Regardless of the scientific merits of the research, the ferocity of the attack made it clear that neither the scientific establishment nor the biotechnology industry have much interest in keeping the new genetic traits under control.

Globalization

Globalization elicits dread and outrage for two principal reasons. The first is the potential loss of national identity and autonomy to multinational corporations bent on maximizing profit. The second is the possibility that international regulatory bodies established to deal with globalization issues might make decisions that favor corporate interests at the expense of public welfare and social justice, especially in the areas of health, environmental protection, and food safety. From a business perspective, globalization is about open markets, low wages, and minimal regulations. Regulations, from this perspective, are costly and complicated barriers to selling products on international markets. If, for example, a country decides to invoke the precautionary principle and require premarket testing and labeling of genetically modified foods, it could refuse to buy U.S. crops that were not segregated and labeled. It is easy to see how international disputes about such matters could become difficult. Such disputes are resolved through three international bodies: the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Biosafety Protocol, and the Codex Alimentarius.

The increasingly powerful WTO is the most important of these bodies. Countries belonging to the United Nations created the WTO to develop, administer, and—most notably—enforce their trade agreements. The purpose of the WTO is to promote free trade, ideally through guarantees of fair and consistent treatment of exports from all member countries. WTO rules require member states to (1) consider all other members as equal trading partners, (2) treat all foreign corporations just as they treat their own, and (3) eliminate all competitive practices that might give them an unfair advantage. In practice, however, richer countries can and do use the rules to their own advantage.