SENTIENT TIMES June/July 2002

PR Firms Help Corporations “Infect the World”

By George Monbiot

Persuasion works best when it’s invisible. The most effective marketing worms its way into our consciousness, leaving intact the per-ception that we have reached our opinions and made our choices independently. As old as humankind itself, over the past few years this approach has been refined, with the help of the internet, into a technique called “viral marketing.” Last month, the viruses appear to have murdered their host. One of the world’s foremost scientific journals was persuaded to do something it had never done before, and retract a paper it had published.

While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens’ groups to campaign in favor of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

Monsanto knows better than any other corporation the costs of visibility. Its clumsy attempts, in 1997, to persuade people that they wanted to eat GM food all but destroyed the market for its crops. Determined never to make that mistake again, it has engaged the services of a firm which knows how to persuade without being seen to persuade. The Bivings Group specializes in internet lobbying.

An article on its website, entitled Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World, warns that “there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organization is directly involved … it simply is not an intelligent PR move. In cases such as this, it is important to first ‘listen’ to what is being said online … Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party … Perhaps the greatest advantage of viral marketing is that your message is placed into a context where it is more likely to be considered seriously.” A senior executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivings site thanking the PR firm for its “outstanding work.”

On November 29 last year, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a paper in Nature magazine, which claimed that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen. The paper was a disaster for the biotech companies seeking to persuade Mexico, Brazil and the European Union to lift their embargos on GM crops.

Even before publication, the researchers knew their work was hazardous. One of them, Ignacio Chapela, was approached by the director of a Mexican corporation, who first offered him a glittering research post if he withheld his paper, then told him that he knew where to find his children. In the US, Chapela’s opponents have chosen a different form of assassination.

On the day the paper was published, messages started to appear on a biotechnology listserver used by more than 3,000 scientists, called AgBioWorld. The first came from a correspondent named “Mary Murphy.” Chapela is on the board of directors of the Pesticide Action Network, and therefore, she claimed, “not exactly what you’d call an unbiased writer.” Her posting was followed by a message from an “Andura Smetacek,” claiming, falsely, that Chapela’s paper had not been peer-reviewed, that he was “first and foremost an activist” and that the research had been published in collusion with environmentalists. The next day, another email from “Smetacek” asked “how much money does Chapela take in speaking fees, travel reimbursements and other donations … for his help in misleading fear-based marketing campaigns?”

The messages from Murphy and Smetacek stimulated hundreds of others, some of which repeated or embellished the accusations they had made. Senior biotechnologists called for Chapela to be sacked from Berkeley. AgBioWorld launched a petition pointing to the paper’s “fundamental flaws.”

There do appear to be methodological problems with the research Chapela and his colleague David Quist had published, but this is hardly unprecedented in a scientific journal. All science is, and should be, subject to challenge and disproof. But in this case the pressure on Nature was so severe that its editor did something unparalleled in its 133-year history: last month he published, alongside two papers challenging Quist and Chapela’s, a retraction in which he wrote that their research should never have been published.

So the campaign against the researchers was extraordinarily successful; but who precisely started it? Who are “Mary Murphy” and “Andura Smetacek”?

Both claim to be ordinary citizens, without any corporate links. The Bivings Group says it has “no knowledge of them.” “Mary Murphy” uses a hotmail account for posting messages to AgBioWorld. But a message satirizing the opponents of biotech, sent by a “Mary Murphy” to another server two years ago contains the identification bw6.bivwood.com. Bivwood.com is the property of Bivings Woodell, which is part of the Bivings Group.

When I wrote to her to ask whether she was employed by Bivings and whether Mary Murphy was her real name, she replied that she had “no ties to industry.” But she refused to answer my questions on the grounds that “I can see by your articles that you made your mind up long ago about biotech.” The interesting thing about this response is that my message to her did not mention biotechnology. I told her only that I was researching an article about internet lobbying.

Smetacek has, on different occasions, given her address as “London” and “New York.” But the electoral rolls, telephone directories and credit card records in both London and the entire US reveal no “Andura Smetacek.” Her name appears only on AgBioWorld and a few other listservers, on which she has posted scores of messages falsely accusing groups such as Greenpeace of terrorism. My letters to her have elicited no response. But a clue to her possible identity is suggested by her constant promotion of “the Center For Food and Agricultural Research.” The center appears not to exist, except as a website, which repeatedly accuses greens of plotting violence. Cffar.org is registered to someone called Manuel Theodorov. Manuel Theodorov (aka Emmanuel Theodorou) is the “director of associations” at Bivings Woodell.

Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in Nature was launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator, the biotech enthusiast Professor CS Prakash, claims to have no connection to the Bivings Group. But when Jonathan Matthews was searching the site’s archives he received the following error message: “can’t connect to MySQL server on apollo.bivings.com.” Apollo.bivings.com is the main server of the Bivings Group.

“Sometimes,” Bivings boasts, “we win awards. Sometimes only the client knows the precise role we played.”

Sometimes, in other words, real people have no idea that they are being managed by fake ones.

George Monbiot is a journalist and environmentalist in Britain and was the recipient of the United Nations Global 500 Award in 1995 for outstanding environmental achievement.

Potential Risks of GE Foods

Genetic engineering is not simply a matter of trying to improve upon a few species of plant food. When a gene from one species is placed in a different animal or plant a vector, or something that will carry that gene into the genetic factory of the unrelated organism, is required. Oftentimes a virus is used, since it is merely a piece of genetic material with a protein coat that is so small that it can easily “infect” other genetic material. Some of the viruses used as vectors for genes and inserted into plants to make them virus resistant can be combined with genetic material from another invading virus (like the common cold) forming a brand new more virulent virus.

Cancer in chickens often results from infection with the Rous Sarcoma virus. Biotech scientists are using this chicken cancer virus as a vector to implant the growth hormone gene into farmed fish so they will grow faster. The problem is that once inside the fish, this virus can persist and infect the next host that eats that fish. Scientists who say there is no danger to consumers are not required to prove their claims because the US Government does not require any testing or proof of the safety of genetically engineered organisms.

These viruses can also combine with one another to create new plant and animal diseases, and, foreign genetic material from these viruses can be absorbed through our intestines and become incorporated into the cells of our own bodies creating new diseases in us. Genes inserted into plants are put there to make them resistant to certain pests, pesticides, herbicides or antibiotics. But these vectors or gene transporters can also infect the bacteria and other organisms in our intestinal tracts and can even create new antibiotic resistance in them.

Studies conducted by Dr. Arpad Pusztai in the late 1990s in Scotland showed that potatoes, gene-spliced with a substance called lectin from a snowdrop plant, caused major damage to laboratory rats—suppressing their immune systems, damaging vital organs, and producing what appeared to be a severe viral infection in their stomach linings and digestive system. After going public with his test results, Pusztai was fired from his lab and denigrated by the biotech establishment. Despite recommendations by the British Royal Society that Pusztai’s research should be continued, the British government and the biotech industry have refused to release any funding to do so.

A common gene inserted into corn is the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) gene, a bacteria that secretes a toxin that kills many types of pests that infect plants. In Iowa many sow herds fed Bt corn have experienced breeding problems in 50-80% of pigs who were otherwise healthy. At least 12 farmers in Shelby County have encountered false pregnancies in their herds after changing to Bt corn feed. And recent reports have shown that safety tests on genetically modified corn currently growing in Britain were flawed. The crop, T-25 GM corn, was tested in laboratory experiments on chickens. During the tests, twice as many chickens died when fed on T-25 GM corn, compared with those fed on conventional corn. Authorities are now admitting that safety tests were not good enough to give a true picture of the risks involved. Approximately 30% of the corn currently grown in the U.S. is Bt corn.

Insulin like Growth Factor (IGF-1) is contained in milk obtained from cows which have been injected with genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). In January 1996 the International Journal of Health Sciences reported that IGF-1 concentrations are ten times higher in rBGH milk and can be absorbed through our intestines and increase the risk of cancer. Data previously concealed by Monsanto and the FDA, leaked by government scientists in Canada in 1998, indicated that rBGH caused cysts on the thyroid glands and infiltration into the prostate of lab rats—both warning signs for potential cancer. Genetically engineered rBGH is banned in every industrialized country in the world, except for the US. Currently injected into at least 15% of all US dairy cows, rBGH milk is then co-mingled into much of the fluid milk in the US. Use of rBGH is banned in organic production. Adding to these concerns is the fact that genetically engineered bacterial rennet is now being used in the manufacturing of cheese.

Much of the beer produced in the US is now made with GE enzymes which speed up fermentation in yeast. These GE yeasts were recently found to produce a 40 to 200-fold increase in a toxic and mutagenic substance called methylglyoxal.

An official European Union study has concluded that genes will inevitably escape from genetically modified crops, contaminating organic farms, creating superweeds, and driving wild plants to extinction. Pollen from the crops, it concluded, traveled far further than the official “isolation distances” laid down to separate them from ordinary crops. Cross-pollination by GM oilseed rape (canola) has been recorded about two and a half miles away from the crop. Research in Scotland has suggested that bees could carry the pollen at least six miles. The report concludes: “Under current farm practices, local contamination between crops is inevitable.”

Excerpted from the “Total Wellness,” newsletter, May 2001, by Dr. Sherry Rogers, M.D. and BioDemocracy News #39, May 2002, www.organicconsumers.org.

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