Berkeley Laptop Thief: The rest of the story

This Boing-Boing post about a Berkeley Professor who had his laptop stolen and gave a blood-curdling story to his class about the "transponders" hidden in the device, and the amount of sensitive corporate and government research on said laptop, and on how many government agencies would be soon breaking into the student's home like the cops from Minority Report, has been linked on a couple of very prominent blogs, including Engadget, and is making the e-mail rounds. But there's something else going on with regards to the story that isn't mentioned in the original post.

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.

Post edited for grammar so bad it would make my high school English teacher weep.

4/22/05: Post edited again to clarify who retracted the article from Nature.

Comments

[synjones]

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synjones
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