Nature [subscription required] is reporting that Brazilian ecologists are threatening a strike if Marc van Roosmalen is not released. You'll recall that I posted on his case before. Van Roosmalen is a maverick primate researcher who has effectively been imprisoned for 16 years for political reasons. Brazilian researchers are justifiably concerned that if he can be, so can they, in the course of their doing their ecological research. Nature reports:
...in 2002, van Roosmalen was charged with taking four monkeys from the forest northwest of Manaus without permits. The charges led to a federal congressional inquiry, a criminal case and, in June this year, a prison sentence of 15 years and 9 months. Van Roosmalen was convicted of keeping monkeys in a rehabilitation facility at his Manaus home without permits; auctioning names of new primate species to wealthy donors; and selling materials that had been donated to his former employer, the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus.
The sentence has other researchers in Brazil worried. "My main concern is the precedent," says ecologist Regina Luizão of INPA in Manaus. "If this is happening to him now, how can we tell that we are not next?"
The ostensive concern, they say, is biopiracy, but it increasingly looks like this is being used, in other places as well as Brazil, as a way to control access to the natural resources by those wishing to exploit it, rather than stopping that sort of exploitation. Ecology has a habit of saying things governments and vested interests would rather not hear.
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I think you are right, but "sapismo" may also be playing a role here. It's sad to say, but ego plays a big role in science, and in Latin America the big sapos (toads) often tolerate only small non-threatening sapos in the same pool. When a smaller sapo starts to grow, it is eaten alive. One of the more interesting sapismo stories was that of a Brazilian herpetologist, who was fired from his post when he became a zoological celebrity. As a down-and-out persona-non-grata zoologist he started to write popular songs of the romantic genre, became a muscial celebrity and made a small fortune. He returned to the zoological pool as a very large sapo. There is still hope for van Roosmalen.
There is no idea so pure, good and well-intentioned that someone can't find a way to exploit it.