Ignacio Chapela announces lawsuit in ongoing UC Berkeley tenure case

These are:
1. Discrimination
against a whistleblower; Chapela was retaliated against for calling
attention to a matter of public concern - the transmission of pollen
from genetically engineered crops into nearby fields planted with native crops.
2. Fraud. "The university regents failed to disclose to Dr. Chapela
that regardless of his qualifications and satisfaction of the requirements of University policy, he would likely never obtain tenure due to his intellectual convictions and scholarly focus in the event that certain powerful faculty members disagreed with his research agenda andpublications".
3. Discrimination on basis of national origin; they are able to
demonstrate that the university has a record of unequally granting
tenture to candidates from different background with equivalent publication records and demonstration of permit

I am a graduate student who has attended genetics seminars in ESPM, and I can say that I have never heard anyone express criticisms of the scientific merit of the 2001 paper published in Nature, with David Quist as the first author, that was the center of most debate. After private agricultural company which sells transgenic maize made complaints, Nature published a retraction of the article. However, the main area of contention seems to be the wording of the conclusion section of the paper,
and most population geneticists on campus agree that they accurately reported their results that pollen from transgenic maize was traveling long distances from the field in which it was planted and was spreading among native maize strains. At universities, seminar and discussion groups regularly review published papers and come up with many criticisms of techniques and aspects of interpretation for papers published in top journals such as Science and nature, and so the fact that there are criticisms of the conclusions that Quist and Chapela chose to draw in their paper are not unique by any means.
Ignacio Chapela has a career history working in agricultural biotech research at the USDA, with Sandoz Pharmaceutical, limited in Basel switzerland, and as a visiting fellow in the Dept. of Plant pathology at Cornell University. 32 of 33 people in his department recommended his tenure, as well as two independent university committees. One member of an ad hoc tenure committee, insect biology professor W. Getz, leaked information about the proceedings of the committee which indicated that Chapela had near unanimous report, but a Molecular and Cellular biology department professor J. Rine singularly opposed his tenure. Jas per Rine has a conflict of interest as a member of the tenure review committee because he started the Acacia Biosciences company which is now held by Inpharmatics in Kirkland, WA, and is vested in the field of maize biotechnology. This is precisely the area of agriculture that Chapela has made public policy statements regarding. The court case is expected to last possibly 18 months.
A popular press article in the Eastbay Express provides good
background material for this case:
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/Chapela-Quist-Kernels-Of-Truth29may02.htm