UCSF's War Against Scientists

The University of California at San Francisco is sponsoring, with taxpayer dollars, an assault on taxpayer funded scientists.  Not only have they created slanderous databases, they now are hosting public lectures where industry-sponsored activists are allowed to impeach established evidence and smear the reputations of actual public scientists.

Like me.

US-Right to Know has a clear agenda, and scientists that teach information that is counter to that agenda are systematically dismantled using a series of well-established techniques, which include selective publication and interpretation of public records requests, defamatory websites, and manipulation of journalists to tell their crooked story. 

Now they have a patsy on the inside of UCSF, someone that is complicit in furthering their smear campaign.  I've already written about the Chemical Industry Documents library, where my conversations with other academics about lavaliere microphones and  private conversations with newly arrived lab staff. 

 Here's one from the "Chemical Industry Documents" section of the UCSF website.  It was my new postdoc landing in Gainesville and seeking to arrange a meeting. This is what they call the illicit interworkings of the Chemical industry. 

The goal is to use the gravitas of a legitimate university to discredit, as much as possible, other academics.  They can report that I have thousands of pages of "chemical industry correspondence"-- when these are just day-to-day discussions and me doing my job. 

On September 13 UCSF sponsored a group of speakers called, Unsealing the Science:  What the Public Can Learn from Chemical Industry Documents. 

Wow.  My personal correspondences with the lab and the GMO Answers website are chemical industry documents that put Gary Ruskin in "peril" by exposing them?  

Breaks my heart.  A lecture hall of students gets to hear two non-scientists present their industry-paid opinions on why actual scientists are all chemical-industry crooks that want to poison them. 

The session features two people that have personally targeted me, Gary Ruskin and Jonathan Latham.  Latham is the stooge that runs Independent Science News.  He's a relatively benign former scientist that publishes patently false information and calls it news.  He's not stupid, so he's deliberately deceptive. Gary is Gary, paid by an industry to assault the careers of scientists paid by the taxpayer. 

These people are motivated activists, not academics. They are held to no standard, no rigor.  And these were the people presenting that lecture to a room of students. 

This is not even "teaching the controversy".   It is an asymmetrical vomiting of bogus information from known anti-science entities.

Gary Ruskin presents my article on Genetic Literacy Project as an attempt to mislead the public about glyphosate. 

Why is UCSF providing a forum for merchants of doubt to create fear, uncertainty and doubt, and besmirch the reputations of actual public scientists?  I've complained, and they don't care. 

Oh, and UC-Berkeley brought a busload of journalism students down to this event too. 

Journalism students were treated to literal fake news, presented by industry-funded activists that seek to stop science education. 

If UCSF brought in Holocaust deniers to provide a lecture on how they were silenced and how their opinions are more important than the evidence, people would be rightfully outraged.  Same if UCSF brought in speakers denouncing climate change, suggesting vaccines cause autism, or claim HIV is not a cause of AIDS. 

Then why does UCSF use public resources to sponsor known science-hostile activists to tarnish the minds of students in attendance?  

This is a very serious problem.