Access

Correspondence

Nature 417, 897 (27 June 2002) | doi:10.1038/417897b

Open Innovation Challenges

naturejobs

Conflicts around a study of Mexican crops

Kenneth Worthy1, Richard C. Strohman2 & Paul R. Billings3

  1. Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, 135 Giannini Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-3312, USA
  2. Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 229 Stanley Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-3206, USA
  3. GeneSage, Inc., 589 Howard Street, San Francisco, California 94105, USA

Correspondence to: Kenneth Worthy1 Email: kworthy@nature.berkeley.edu

The controversy surrounding Quist and Chapela's findings of transgenic introgression in Mexican maize1, 2, 3, 4 is taking place within webs of political and financial influence that compromise the objectivity of their critics.The eight authors of the two published criticisms1, 2 of Quist and Chapela's paper4 have had all or part of their research funded by the Torrey Mesa Research Institute (TMRI), an offspring of the agricultural biotechnology company Novartis (now Syngenta).