Besides the fact that Jasper Rine was, er, bluffing, there is some interesting background here.

Strange Interlude has the details.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about either genetically modified food or the tenure process at Berkeley. I do know 90% of what the Rine says in the clip is technologically implausible at best.

I googled the Professor’s name (Jasper Rine), and I found that he is indeed, as he says, working with some very prominent businesses. But that’s the source of quite a bit of controversy, particularly for a tenure decision that he played a part in. It’s alleged that his financial ties to the biotech company Novartis constituted a conflict of interest in denying tenure to Ignacio Chapela, who is very critical of the biotech industry. Chapela wrote a paper, published in Nature, and then essentially retracted by the magazine about Genetically Modified food contaminating other crops in Mexico. The ensuing controversy over the ties between corporations and academia was enough to make the cover of the Atlantic Monthly. And Chapela just this Monday filed a lawsuit against the University of California Regents over this matter. Assuming there is any information on the laptop about this dispute (say incriminating e-mails), it would obviously be legally inadmissable, but it could be very embarrassing for both him and the corporations he works for. It might been motive for an activist, but I’m just speculating here. I will say, technical plausibilty aside, he seems a bad person to steal stuff from.

Saheli has more.

This article in the Feb. 2004 issue of the California Monthly, Berkeley’s Alumni magazine, seems to sum up the situation fairly well. As fellow alumni of my era will remember, in 1998 UC Berkeley signed a controversial 5-year $25 Million research contract with agricultural-biotech giant Novartis, whose Swiss successor company Syngenta inherited the deal. In exchange for the Plant and Molecular Biology Department research funding, Berkeley had to give Novartis/Syngenta first dibs on some proportion of patents (or patent licenses? It’s not clear to me) and had a 2/5 vote on the committee to select research projects. Plenty of students and faculty were unhappy about this. One of those faculty was one Igacio Chapela, untenured at the time. In 2001 he published a research article in Nature describing evidence that genetically engineered elements inserted into Monsanto corn had crept into native corne in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article was challenged by so many scientists that Nature engaged in the unprecented action of “withdrawing support.” But “Quist and Chapela point out that all of the letters printed by Nature disparaging the research–including those from the Cal campus–were written by people with ties to the Berkeley-Novartis agreement.”

The tricky part was that Chapela then came up for tenure: [Read the rest here…]