Amyris first quarter losses hit $94.5 million

That was the word today from CEO [and former BP vice president] John Melo.

The loses, which include $36.7 million from failed stock sales and the closure of the company’s U.S. ethanol distribution system, are nearly three times those of the first quarter of 2011.

The announcement heralds yet another setback of the UC-Berkeley-spawned genetic engineering company founded by Jay Keasling, Cal’s resident “synthetic biology” superstar and serial entrepreneur [he cashed out of Amryis long ago and has launched another, rival firm].

From the company’s announcement:

Aggregate revenues for the quarter ended March 31, 2012 were $29.5 million versus $37.2 million in the first quarter of 2011. This change in revenue was due to a decline in Amyris Fuels sales as Amyris executes the planned wind-down of this business line. Cost of products sold was $43.8 million versus $34.4 million, related to costs incurred in the delivery of Amyris Fuels products and costs associated with the production of Amyris renewable products. The Company also recorded a charge of $36.7 million in the quarter ended March 31, 2012 related to losses on purchase commitments and write-off of production assets. Research and development expense increased to $21.3 million from $19.7 million, and sales, general and administrative expense increased to $21.7 million from $16.0 million. First quarter 2012 GAAP net loss attributable to common stockholders was $94.5 million compared with $33.1 million in the same quarter of 2011. On a non-GAAP basis, excluding stock-based compensation expense and the losses from fixed purchase commitments and write-off of production assets, the net loss attributable to Amyris, Inc. common stockholders for the first quarter ended March 31, 2012 was $51.4 million compared to $29.1 million in the prior year. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is included in this release.

The Company’s balance at the end of the first quarter of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities was $103.5 million.

Part of the losses stem from the decision by a major investor, the Fidelity group of funds, to liquidate two-thirds of their holdings in the firm, a bombshell dropped on investors Friday in advance of today’s earning statement.

Fidelity had plunged into Amyris with a massive and much-heralded $25 million buy of “senior unsecured convertible promissory notes” on 28 February.

There’s a name for it: The Amyris effect

The company’s shares hit an all-time low of $2.30 in early morning trading today, then recovered to $2.53 by market close.

The collapse of Amyris share prices — from $33.85 14 months ago to today’s record low — reflects a broader trend in the profiles of companies that have sought to bring genetic engineering to the task of producing new plant-based fuels.

Writing in Biofuels Digest, Jim Lane gives it a name:

Call it the Amyris effect — after the company that has struggled with the issues more than any other, in its pursuit of world-class scale. Why is it important? For one, poor post-IPO performance by the handful of companies that have made it through the IPO gate, is bound to impact the chances of others to come through later.

Read the rest.

A board member departs

The company also filed an announcement with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealing that Samir Kaul, one of six partners at high profile “green” investment firm Khosla Ventures, has resigned as an independent director on the Amyris board:

On May 3, 2012, Samir Kaul resigned from the Board of Directors (the “Board”) of Amyris, Inc. (the “Company”), effective immediately. The Board simultaneously appointed Geoffrey Duyk, a partner of TPG Biotech (the growth equity and venture investment platform of the global private investment firm TPG) and a director of the Company from May 2006 to May 2011, to serve as a director effective immediately following Mr. Kaul’s resignation. The Board appointed Dr. Duyk to the Class I board seat previously held by Mr. Kaul. The Board also appointed Dr. Duyk to serve as a member of the Audit Committee in place of Mr. Kaul. At the same meeting, the Board appointed Carole Piwnica and John Doerr to serve as members of the Leadership Development and Compensation Committee, one to serve as a replacement for Mr. Kaul and one to serve as a replacement for Patrick Pichette, who previously had served on the Leadership Development and Compensation Committee.

TPG is another investor, holding 6.5 million shares.

Khosla Ventures was represented on the board not because of the size of their holdings [only 61,238 shares compared to the 11.9 million held by French oil giant Total] but presumably because firm founder Vinod Khosla is the leading celebrity investors in the green energy game.

More on the departures of two executives

May Day brought the departure of two senior Amyris executives [here and here], and another document filed with the SEC today revealed more details of the

Amyris shares hit another new low, $2.30

The shares of the UC Berkeley-spawned genetic engineering company are back up to $2,48 as we write, with the company’s earning statement to come today.

Amyris loses major investment, shares at new low

UPDATE III: Shares closed at the all-time low of $2.47.

UPDATE II: Amyris shares hit another new low, $2.49.

UPDATE: Shares just hit another record low as we were posting. They’re now selling for $2.59.

Companies like to drop bad news on Friday. That’s because few people are interested in news on Saturday.

Amyris, the UC-Berkeley spawned genetic engineering company created by Val “bioengineer” Jay Keasling, dropped a bombshell on Friday afternoon: Their biggest mutual find investor, the Fidelity group of funds, is selling off two thirds of their holdings.

The company had trumpeted the news when Fidelity bought 6.2 million shares on 28 February, paying $5.78 a share.

As of market close Friday, those same shares were worth $2.73, and as we write, they’re going for $2.65, just four cents above the company’s all-time low of two weeks ago. Shares were going to $33.85 just 14 months ago.

In a prospectus Amyris filed to sell the Fidelity shares, the company made the usually cautionary disclosures.

These in particular caught our eye:

We have very limited experience producing our products at the commercial scale needed for the development of our business, and we will not succeed if we cannot effectively scale our technology and processes.

>snip<

[O]ur technology may not perform as expected when applied at commercial scale on a sustained basis, or we may encounter operational challenges for which we are unable to devise a workable solution. For example, in 2011 at our contract manufacturing facilities, contamination in the production process, problems with plant utilities, lack of automation and related human error, process modifications to reduce costs and adjust product specifications, and other similar challenges decreased process efficiency, created delays and increased our costs. Such challenges are likely to continue as we and our contract manufacturing partners develop our production processes and establish new facilities.

Back in 2010, in a video produced for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he hangs his hat as the lab’s chief synthetic biologist, Keasling blithely dismissed any problems with scaling up. As he observes in the video “They scale beautifully.”

To which we can only add, except when they don’t.

Back to the prospectus, where we discovered this little item:

The 4,173,622 shares of common stock covered by this prospectus may be acquired by the selling stockholders from us by electing to convert the senior unsecured convertible promissory notes issued to the selling stockholders pursuant to the Securities Purchase Agreement, dated February 24, 2012, by and between us and the selling stockholders. We agreed to file a registration statement with the SEC covering the resale of the shares issuable upon conversion of the unsecured senior convertible promissory notes referenced above.

Note that word “unsecured.”

UPDATE: Some background

Amyris was started by Keasling and funded by Bill Gates to used genetically engineered microbes produce a cheap version of the antimalarial artemisin to replace the drugg naturally derived from artemisia, the wormwood plant, which is cultivated by thousands of farmers in Asia and Africa.

While the bugs produced the drug, the price was no cheaper than the natural version [see here and here for some background.].

They next converted the microbe to produce precursors of fuel from plant cellulose. So far the process has been used mainly to produce higher cost chemicals for use in cosmetics, and mass-produced fuel remains a dream, thanks to those scale-up problems Keasling blithely assured us weren’t a problem.

Then, just two weeks ago, the company announced it was dumping its U.S. ethanol distribution system,

Just what the future holds for the company remains very much in doubt, and just how long the other major institutional investors will be willing to accommodate massive losses before forcing a bankruptcy remains an open question.

Three pictures of an occupation, the golden hour

Some shots we took last Monday while visit the Occupy the Farm encampment as the shut began to sink in the west, adding that warmth of light that makes it what photographers call “the golden hour.” Click on any of the images to enlarge.

Time for a musical interlude. . .

30 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 40 mm, 1/160 second, f/16

Tools and supplies laid down for the day. . .

30 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 20 mm, 1/320 second, f/16

While the signs remain on alert. . .

30 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 28 mm, 1/100 second, f/16

Another Cal prof weighs in on Occupy the Farm

Occupy the Farm [previously], the ongoing launched-on-Earth-Day Occupation of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract agricultural plot, continues.

While the university had wrongly claimed the action had no support from researchers who worked at the site [Miguel Altieri], the action has also enlisted some other notable faculty support [Claudia Carr, Paul Rabinow, Laura Nader, etc.]

Now consider this excerpt of a statement by Professor Jeffrey M. Romm of Cal’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, who specializes in natural resource and environmental policy. Posted at the Occupy the Farm website:

The current Gill Tract issue replicates the kind of problem that many college researchers have worked successfully to overcome, i.e. structural divides that prevent effective ecosystem management in large part by excluding those with the strongest motives for beneficial action. Faculty and students so involved cannot be expected to turn their backs on the core lessons of their careers. The mutual benefits of overcoming the divide and achieving cooperative relations between campus and community are so demonstrable and compelling that a number of faculty would not maintain their integrity if siding with the party that refuses opportunities for cooperation and adaptability.

The Gill Tract occupation creates a huge opportunity. After fifteen years of stonewall in the midst of sweeping social and ecological changes, the occupation should have come as no surprise to anyone. It does come at a time, though, when the university has become surrounded by community generated agricultural enterprise and has established its own capacity to respond in truly excellent fashion. The occupation has been conducted with utmost respect for the university, the community and the land. Equivalent responses by the university would produce a major step forward for everyone. The meaning and matter of Gill Tract extend throughout the Bay Area, with the potential for much more.

Read the rest.

Romm’s insights are particularly noteworthy in light of his expertise, particularly as described in this excerpt from his web page:

Distribution, Growth, and Resource ‘Sustainability’: Our group studies how the dynamics of social distribution, economic growth, and ecosystems interact and respond to alternative forms of policy and organization. These studies range through farm, village, watershed, county, state, and national to global scales of analysis. The conceptual frameworks are chosen to suit the particular problem of interest, but come primarily from political science, ecology, economics and sociology. Members of the group, although each is focused on one or several of these disciplines, develop a shared capacity in the work of all members. Specific topics have included, for example: the dynamics of irrigation, groundwater and watershed regimes (India, Samoa, Philippines, United States); regional patterns of soil enhancement, conservation and decline (Philippines, Nepal); adoption of agroforestry, social forestry and community forestry at farm, village and regional levels (India, Nepal, Bangladesh, United States); forest and land use dynamics and ecological change (Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, United States); impacts of national and state policies on resource use and environmental possibilities (Vietnam, United States, India).

In short, just the sort of guy about the right use of the last urban farmland acreage left along San Francisco Bay’s urban eastern shore.

UC Berkeley profs offer Gill Tract proposal

From the Occupy the Farm blog a proposal from two Cal faculty members:

How to turn the “occupy the UC Gill Tract” conflict into an opportunity for resolving key food, environmental and social problems affecting our Bay Area urban communities?

Last Updated on 30 April 2012

Published on 30 April 2012

Miguel A. Altieri

Professor of Agroecology, College of Natural Resources, UC Berkeley

And

Claudia J. Carr

Associate Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley

Dozens of advocates of community urban farming took over UC’s Gill Tract on Earth Day, April 22, establishing a camp and planting about two acres of vegetable crops. Their goal is to prevent development of this five-acre piece of land that represents one the few remaining agricultural spaces with the best (“class-one”) soil in the East Bay. This effort would allow the community to be engaged with the land, arguing that preserving it as a productive farm is consistent with public policy and the public interest. Such preservation would also honor the history of the Gill Tract, which has housed researchers who, since the 1940’s, conducted research on biological pest control, protecting California agriculture from exotic pests without the use of chemical pesticides.

To many people, the actions taken by the farm advocates are consistent with the University’s education and public mission as a Land Grant institution with a Cooperative Extension function, (the latter established in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914), to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture. Their actions are also consistent with California public policy as set forth in section 815, to preserve and protect open space, particularly agricultural land that has historical significance – such as the Gill Tract.

The UC Berkeley administration counters that the land being occupied is currently, and for the foreseeable future, being used as an open-air laboratory by the students and faculty of the College of Natural Resources for agricultural research. They argue that this use is part of a larger quest to provide a hungry planet with more abundant food, which will be impeded if the protest continues. (In fact, this is a poor argument, since hunger is not primarily related to production but much more to poverty and lack of access to land). Although UC’s comments about not developing the five acres may be technically correct, they may be perceived as misleading for at least three reasons:

(i) since its purchase in 1928 ( or, perhaps, its bequest to UC by the Gill family farm with the condition that it should be used forever as an agricultural research station), UC has parceled, sold off, and developed about 90% of the 104 acre plot. Can a land grant University divert agricultural land to commercial or recreational uses? Does such diversion contradict the land grant mission of a public University?

(ii) UC has transferred the land from the College of Natural Resources to UCB Capital Projects, its commercial arm which specializes in “development projects”; and

(iii) the 2004 Master Plan, jointly worked out with the Albany City Council and Planning Commission, clearly states that the land has been re-designated from “academic reserve” to “recreation and open space”  which may mean baseball and soccer fields, parks, or any number of recreational designations.

 Does such redesignation guarantee the preservation of the land for an urban agriculture center? This is an idea that several professors, students, 45 non profit organizations and community members, organized under the Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), presented in the form of a proposal to the University in February 2000. The proposal was for the creation of the world’s first university center on sustainable urban agriculture and food systems. The purposes of the Center were to be to promote research, education, extension and outreach in the various environmental and socioeconomic dimensions of urban farming and sustainable food systems. This proposal was ignored by the University, and so was a later one, presented in 2005 by Urban Roots, to create the Village Creek Farm and Gardens, a farm that would provide Bay Area students from preschool to community college and university with an educational resource par excellence. Urban Roots argued at the time that a Center for Urban Agriculture at the Gill Tract offered UC Berkeley the opportunity to join other organizations and community members in teaching students and future urban dwellers these skills and the benefits of locally produced food. From these facts, it can be concluded that until now, the University has shown little or no interest in requests for community involvement and benefit from the exceptionally high quality lands at the Gill Tract.

Last week UC asserted in a statement: “We are passionate advocates of metropolitan agriculture projects that are well planned, sustainable and considerate of all members of our community. Representatives of the university are more than willing to meet with any interested community members to discuss proposals for metropolitan, sustainable agriculture.” The community group’s current action presents a golden opportunity for all within UC, including the newly created faculty and student based Center for Diversified Farming Systems, as well as non-profit organizations working on food justice and urban agriculture and community members, to revive the previous ideas for creating a Center for sustainable urban farming.

Why is this important as we start the second decade of the new Millennium?

The rapid urbanization that is taking place in the Bay Area goes hand in hand with a rapid increase in urban poverty and food insecurity, a situation aggravated by the economic crisis affecting California. Half a million people are at risk of hunger every month. About 38 percent of them are children, especially in summer, because low-income children who normally receive free or reduced lunches during the school year no longer have these meals. As a result, parents struggle to find the extra funds needed to provide healthy, nutritious meals for their children, even in the face of high unemployment. Many low-income urban residents in the Bay Area reside in “food deserts,” i.e. in areas having limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly in lower income neighborhoods and communities.

Urban agriculture plays a key role in enhancing urban food security, since the costs of supplying and distributing food from rural to urban areas, or to import food for the cities, are rising continuously, thus increasing therefore urban food insecurity. Take Oakland as an example: in that city publicly owned land with productive potential totals 1,201 acres. Food production with agroecological methods at these sites could potentially produce as much as 15 to 20 percent of Oakland’s fruit and vegetable needs. But to realize this potential, UC Berkeley first needs to recognize the potential of urban agriculture to help solve problems of hunger and unemployment, and then launch a major research, education and extension program on urban agriculture that should involve local governments, urban farmers and the whole community in participatory ways, so as to address the real needs of the poor and hungry. The benefits of urban agriculture go beyond producing food: they extend to the promotion of local economic development, poverty alleviation and social inclusion of the poor — and of women, in particular. Urban agriculture also contributes to the urban ecosystem by greening the city, productively reusing urban wastes, conserving pollinators and wildlife, and saving energy involved in the transport of food (in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions!).

 Let us transform the conflict potentially unfolding into a positive dialogue that will lead the University to continue carrying out its major mission of working with communities to serve the needs of the people of California. What could be more important than doing this around the issue of local food production?

UC Berkeley and the politics of punishment

You’ve got to hand it to Robert “Grinnin’ Bobby” Birgeneau.

The UC Berkeley chancellor who once boasted of his days as a civil rights activist in the Deep South has proven himself time and again a foe of his latter-day counterparts.

His UC Police Department has trained with Israeli border police and the Bahrain military, two outfits who really know how to beat down civil disobedience, and they’re up to date on all the skills of creative “nudging.”

But Bobby B has done them one better, using the judicial process to inflict another form of punishment, even while eventually dropping charges against those his Israeli- and Bahraini-trained troops have brutally busted.

When campus cops swooped down on Occupy Cal 9 November, they arrested a dozen students and one faculty member on a laundry list of charges.

Having an arrest record in the midst of a depression is in itself a serious handicap to job-seekers, and those arrests remain on the record, regardless of the outcome of the judicial process.

So call that the first punishment.

Grinnin' Bobby Birgeneau

But Birgenau has taken the process one fiendish step further.

Getting arrested is an onerous process; involving handcuffs, sometimes a strip search, a holding cell and — if you can’t make bail — the prospect of longer incarceration.

And then there’s the lawyer. Anyone who gets arrested needs a lawyer, and lawyers don’t come cheap.

The lawyer’s meter is running for each court appearance, including her travel time to and from the court, and during the drafting of each and every motion or memorandum of points and authorities and whatever other paperwork needs doing — along with the research time to prepare it.

It all adds up, and the bill’s still there to be paid even if they’re eventually found not guilty.

And students being students, they may have to borrow to pay the bills, adding one more increment to their ever-growing mountain of student loan debt.

So call being arrested the first punishment and the legal bills the second.

And here’s where Birgenau’s strategy gets really fiendish.

In addition to the arrests, Birgeneau issued orders barring the arrested from campus, except for attendance at classes and other official business. They couldn’t set foot on campus to grab a soda with friends or other normal activities that are part of student life on campus.

Now it gets really cute.

Grinnin’ Bob has added a whole new layer to the game, one we’ll call Prosecutus Interruptus.

See, over the past five months he’s been lifting the stay-aways, one student here, another two there, and so on. And lately he’s been doing the same thing with the criminal charges, dropping a couple here, another there.

Now most of both the stay-aways and the criminal charges have been dismissed. After, of course, several of those costly court hearings.

The one prominent case that remains is that of Professor Celeste Langan, the faculty member who was famously grabbed by the hair and thrown to the ground, as shown starting at about 14 seconds in this video of the 9 November arrests:

One could make a real case that on the Berkeley campus, faculty who take part in protests earn the special scorn of administrators.

So we’re not suprised to learn that Langan may turn out to be the last defendant to have her charges dismissed.

Shannon Najmabadi reported for the Daily Californian Friday:

UC Berkeley associate English professor Celeste Langan — whose trial is scheduled for May 4 — said that she was told by her attorney that her charges would also be dropped at her hearing in May.

“While it’s great to know that we will not have to go to trial, in my case it’s almost frustrating, as I won’t have (the) opportunity to challenge the police reports of two Alameda County Sheriff’s officers who claimed that I pushed one of them with both hands in the chest – a complete and utter fabrication,” Langan said in an email.

Read the rest.

While the charges may vanish, the arrest records and the legal bills don’t.

But maybe that’s the real education, a first-hand glimpse of the perils of challenging entrenched power?

So it is fitting that we close with an excerpt from a story about the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement we wrote for the Berkeley Daily Planet issue of 12 October 2004:

After introductory remarks by ASUC President Misha Leybovich, Birgeneau recounted the events after his graduation from Yale in 1964—where he’d done volunteer work in inner-city New Haven.

Birgeneau and his spouse headed to the deep South as a volunteer in the civil rights movement, where they shared a dwelling with two FSM leaders.

“I had only been out of Canada for two years, and it was an extraordinarily valuable experience,” he said.

Birgeneau’s address did draw resounding boos with the mention of the former Secretary of State who was the architect of Preside nt Richard Nixon’s Southeast Asian war strategy.

“I had dinner last week with Henry Kissinger and a senior official from Vietnam,” he said. The Vietnamese official “said we would not have had peace and unity in Vietnam if not for” the antiwar movement in the United States.

Read the rest.

The Gill Tract: Pictures at an Occupation

Here’s a sampling of the sites we encountered Saturday on our visit to Occupy the Farm. Click on the images to enlarge.

A banner greets visits as they enter the site, which is located near the southwestern corner of the intersection of San Pablo and Marin avenues.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 27mm, 1/4000 sec, f7.1

Supplies and seedlings waiting to be planted.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 18mm, 1/2000 sec, f7.1

A family planting.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 24mm, 1/1600 sec, f7.1

And what’s a field without a scarecrow?

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 90 mm, 1/2500 sec, f7.1

No encampment’s complete without tents.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 38mm, 1/3200 sec, f7.1

And art was on the agenda.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 20mm, 1/5000 sec, f7.1

And art requires an artist.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 20mm, 1/1600 sec, f7.1

Gathering for conversation.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 27mm, 1/4000 sec, f7.1

While others head for some eats.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 18mm, 1/640 sec, f7.1

And still others cleanup up.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 28mm, 1/1250 sec, f7.1

And what’s an occupation with a cop, in this case a UCPD officer reciting a daily ritual announcement that the occupation is illegal and subject to eviction at any moment, accompanied by arrest.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 27mm, 1/800 sec, f7.1

Headline of the day: They’re eating our brains

And the University of California is helping them.

From Neuromarketing:

Neuromarketing Proof? UCLA Brain Scans Predict Ad Success

Occupy the Farm: Rebuttal and an open house

Here’s the latest from Occupy the Farm, the movement that’s taken over the farmland at UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract [previously], including both a rebuttal of claims by the university and the schedule of event’s at this weekend’s open house.

Occupy The Farm in Discussion with UC Researchers

Weekend Open House Planed for Community and Media 

The coalition of local residents, farmers, students, and activists occupying the Gill Tract is currently in direct discussion with UC Berkeley Gill Tract researchers, contrary to claims put forth in the UC’s latest public statement. The UCB administration has not taken part in conversations between Occupy the Farm and researchers.

The UC has consistently acted in bad faith, disregarding community input. For decades, students, faculty, and local residents have tried to engage the UC in dialogue, articulating their desire to transform the Gill Tract into a center for sustainable urban agriculture.

Instead, the UC transferred administration of the Gill Tract from the College of Natural Resources to Capital Projects, the arm of the university responsible for managing development. The UC Village Master Plan would replace the current agricultural land with ambiguously-termed commercial, recreational, and “open” space. Farmland is for farming, and we cannot allow the UC to destroy one of the best resources for urban agriculture in the Bay Area.

Major Community Events Planned for Weekend

From 10 AM to sundown on Saturday and Sunday, April 28th and 29th, Occupy the Farm will host a weekend of workshops, farming and family fun! Events will including a special teach-in by Dr. Miguel Altieri, who has been conducting agroecological research at the Gill Tract since 1981. The workshop will begin at 12pm on Saturday, and Dr. Altieri will field questions from the media at 1pm.

Below is a full list of events to occur at the farm throughout the weekend.

Saturday:

• 10 AM: Yoga for radical farmers with Sri louise
• 11 AM: Intro to permaculture – Ryan Rising
• 12 – 1: Potluck lunch, seed planting all day w/ 10 min demos on the hour in the field
•  Also at 12: Teach-in with Dr. Miguel Altieri
• 1 PM: Media Q and A with Dr. Miguel Altieri
• 1-2 PM:  Design charette – bring your visions, drawings, and ideas for the farm
• 2 PM: Corn planting (three sisters) w/ Ashoka
• 2 PM: Fermentation w/ erin @ kitchen
• 3 PM: Massage kale cooking, kitchen area
• 3 PM: Permaculture garden groundwork – pathways and planting beds in the children’s garden
• 4 PM: Indian cooking at the kitchen
• 4 PM: Seed bomb workshop w/ the youth!
• 5 PM: School house construction
• 5 PM: Folk music jam w/ lesley
• 5:45 PM: Blessing w/ Colin
• 6 PM: Sit down dinner
• 8 PM (Sunset): Movie and film screenings w/ popcorn!

Sunday : Throw the hoe down

• 10 AM: Meditation and yoga w/ colin
• 11 AM: Ladybug patch grandopeneing and celebration – children’s edu garden and petting place
• 11:15-11:45 AM: Family yoga w/ Sheri Spellwoman at the Ladybug patch
• 12 PM: Lunch and poetry readings at the kitchen
• 1 PM: Hoe down and square dance
• 4 PM: Water Strider band
• 5 PM: Folk jam w/ lesley
• 6 PM: Sit down dinner

Occupy the Farm offers Saturday tour

Occupy the Farm [previously], the takeover of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract in nearby Albany, continues, with the activists scheduling a Friday open house at the site, which is slated for development as a Whole Foods store and a senior housing project.

We’re bring you both the announcement from the Occupy activists and the latest response from the university, issued after a meeting with Occupy participants.

First, from Occupy The Farm:

Join the Occupy the Farm Fact vs. Fiction Tour

Created on 26 April 2012

Take Back the Tract Invites the Public “Back to the Land”

The Gill Tract, Albany, CA – In response to the establishment of the Farm at the Gill Tract, UC Berkeley Public Relations has issued false statements regarding practices at the farm. Occupy the Farm would like to clarify some misconceptions and invite members of the broader East Bay community and members of the Press to participate in a tour of the fledgling Farm.

The tour will take place at 4pm on Saturday, April 28th.

“The whole idea here is that this is an open, participatory, community-based farm. We invite all comers to see what we’re doing. Better yet, we invite you to join us,” said Stefanie Rawlings.

Established on the last, best agriculture land in the urbanized East Bay, known as the Gill Tract, the Farm is committed to the practice and promotion of sustainable urban agriculture for local communities who face increasing economic and environmental pressures. The University, which administers the Gill Tract –originally 104 acres of agricultural land — has parceled off and sold all but 20 acres, of which half is currently slated for development.

Among the false statements made by UC Public Relations is the suggestion that raw human waste is in contact with soil.

“We’re farmers. We know better than to crap on our crops,” said David Grefrath, one of many cultivating the land.

Occupy the Farm has a closed composting toilet system in which there is no contact between human waste and soil. They also have portable toilets and, thanks to neighborhood support, access to real bathrooms. Additionally, there is a comprehensive system for recycling, compost, trash, and dishwashing.

“The real health and safety issue is that they cut off the water supply,” said Grefrath.

On Monday, April 23rd at approximately 1:30 pm, UC Berkeley cut off the water supply to the Gill Tract, affecting not only the field under cultivation, but also a tree nursery administered by the City of Albany on the south side of Village Creek. The nursery is a repository for trees destined for Albany’s city streets. Tony Wolcott, a nursery manager for the City of Albany, says, “We depend on the water to keep these trees alive.” Wolcott was on site to transport several of the trees to a community garden project in Richmond, CA.

The operation of the fire hydrant on site has apparently been limited as well. A visiting UC operations staff person who wished to remain anonymous declared, “Normally the pressure gauge on the hydrant has a reading on it. Right now we’re at zero. That’s not normal.” A fireman with the Albany Fire Department confirmed that water-flow

Occupy vs UC Berkeley in urban farm battle

UC Berkeley, once one of the world’s leading research hubs for sustainable agriculture, has jumped on the corporate bandwagon and has gutted the once-vaunted program, which has been reduced to one full-time faculty member.

Abandoning agroecology for corporate-backed genetic engineering programs, the school wants to turn their once-flourishing agroecology plot — the last bit of Class I farmland remaining in San Francisco Bay’s eastern shore — into a commercial development, featuring a Whole Foods store [a chain notable for its militant anti-union policies] and a senior housing development.

But a militant band of urban farming advocates hopes to change all that, and picked Earth Day to launch Occupy the Farm, taking over the Gill Tract in Albany and planting 15,000 seedlings.

Needless to say, the University is angry.

The protesters did manage to force the university to withdraw their plans from the agenda of Tuesday night’s meeting of the Albany city planning commission, but the university remains committed to their plans.

Sam Buckland reports for the Daily Californian:

While UCPD officers warned protesters on Sunday that they could face citation and arrest, there have not been any confrontations or arrests so far. Instead, campus administration has begun negotiating with the protesters, according to campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof.

“If you own something and I think I can put what you own to better use, that doesn’t give me a right to take what you own,” Mogulof said. “(But) our focus is on finding a way to bring this to a resolution in a way that allows the research to proceed without any violence or conflict.”

The university shut off the land’s irrigation system on Tuesday, and while local vendors and farms across the coast have shown support by donating food and water to the encampment, supplies are becoming more scarce, according to Anya Kamenskaya, an alumna of the campus College of Natural Resources.

Read the rest.

Jeff Conant, writing at AlterNet, adds some background, citing Kamenskaya, the same activist quoted in the Daily Californian:

Kamenskaya studied with Miguel Altieri, a widely respected professor of agro-ecology who works hard to bridge the divide between university research and the needs of farmers, especially in his native South America. As an undergrad in 2008, Kamenskaya says, she got Altieri’s approval to start a farm-to-school program with a local elementary school, using a piece of the Gill tract to grow the food.

“We got quite far in the process,” she says. “But the university thwarted us, and it became just another in a long string of attempts to preserve this land for agriculture, and community education for food sovereignty.”

“UC Berkeley is a land grant institution and this land is being administered by a university for the public. Everything done here is supposed to be done for the public good,” she said.

Read the rest.

Today’s post features videos from the occupation, two statements from the group about their action, and the university’s response.

The occupation has its own website here, as well as a vlog.

Videos of an occupation

From the vlog, three videos shot by Nick Xavier:

Occupation, Day 1:

Occupation, Day 2:

Occupy the Farm – The Back Story

And here’s a video from vlogger Josh Wolf of the Earth Day action:

The reasons for the occupation

Here’s the movement’s explanation of their action:

Occupy the Farm, a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists are planting over 15,000 seedlings at the Gill Tract, the last remaining 10 acres of Class I agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay area. The Gill Tract is public land administered by the University of California, which plans to sell it to private developers.

For decades the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, the University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural

Quote of the day: A visit to Global Corporate U.

GCU is our pet name for UC Berkeley, and here’s how California State University at Chico economist Michael Perelman, who blogs at Unsettling Economics, describes his impressions of the Berkeley campus:

Tuition began a rapid ascent. Student debt accumulated. University funds were concentrated on programs that cater to business needs, such as biotechnology and engineering, and, naturally, business schools. Visiting Berkeley, I am always struck by the lavish libraries for biotechnology and business, while the other disciplinary libraries were unchanged. The one exception that stood out was public health, which was torn down to make way for a new biotech building and then moved to the basement of an old administrative building.

The educational assembly-line that Mario Savio described during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley has changed, but not for the better. At the same time, leaders in business and politics insist that education is an essential element to a successful economy. Nonetheless, education becomes increasingly unaffordable, at the same time that the quality. Each cohort of students seems less prepared than the last.

All the while, graduate programs are educating students for work that they love, even though top prospect are slim.

Read the rest.

BP’s legacy: Deformed seafood in Gulf of Mexico

More details from Dahr Jamail’s story at the AlJazeera website:

“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Read the rest.

BP, the official corporate sponsor [snark] of the University of California at Berkeley, assures us their genetically modified crops and microbes they plan to use to create the next generation of fuels [will the assistance of Cal scientists] will be utterly harmless to the environment.

So not to worry, right?

UPDATE: BP settles Gulf lawsuit.

From Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian:

BP and lawyers for the businesses claiming damages in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster have finalised the details of a multi-billion dollar settlement and submitted it to a judge in New Orleans.

The proposed settlement, which includes economic and medical claims, must be approved by US district judge Carl Barbier. He has scheduled a closed-door conference on the proposal on 3 May.

More than 100,000 shrimp boat captains, condo owners and other small business owners are suing BP for economic losses during the spill. Lawyers for those plaintiffs claimed victory on Wednesday.

>snip<

BP said last month it expected to pay about $7.8bn to settle claims. But the plaintiffs’ lawyers said on Wednesday there was no cap on economic and property damages.

The statement from the plaintiffs also said that BP had agreed to pay $2.3bn to compensate commercial fishermen, shrimp boat captains, and oyster farmers.

Read the rest.

Amyris hits another record low, $3.33 a share

UPDATE IV: Shares closed for the day at $3.36, less than a tenth of what they were worth a mere thirteen months ago.

UPDATE III: Down again.

UPDATE II: They dropped three cents more to $3.47.

UPDATED The shares dropped another penny.

And the day is young, with the stock going for two three six  seventeen cents less than the last record low set by the UC Berkeley spawned company that still has dreams of turning  crops into fuel for internal combustion engines.

AviationBrief reports that more doubts are surfacing about the drive to turn plants into cost-efficient fuels:

“It’s hard, hard, hard,” to produce biofuels that compete with hydrocarbon fuels, said one industrial chemist. He estimated that crude oil would have to reach $ 125 to $ 150 per barrel for biofuels to be competitive. And public support for biofuel production may not be as generous as once expected, now that budget pressures are becoming more stringent.

Amyris CEO John Melo told conference attendees that his company remained committed to producing biofuels while noting that these represent the “highest risk, cost and challenges in scale-up” and require large balance sheets or partners with large balance sheets.

Nevertheless, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told attendees that advanced biofuels remain a key component of President Obama’s all-of-the-above strategy to limit the impact that foreign oil has on our economy and take control of the U.S.’s energy future.

Read the rest.

Jay Keasling, who started Amyris with backing from Bill Gates, is long gone from the company, heading up a federally-funded UC Berkeley research center downstairs form Amyris in same Emeryville building as well as launching yet another start-up to compete with his old one.

Here once again is Keasling in happier times two years ago when he was confidently declaring that the scale-up woes that have afflicted his former company simply weren’t gonna happen [starting at 1:55]:

But, hey, with Keasling’s former boss at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Steve Chu now serving as Secretary of Energy and Vilsack relentlessly pushing the agrofuel notion, what’s to lose? Except for all the money lost by Amyris investors since the stock peaked at $33.85 last year.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab heads to India

The national lab, run by the University of California for the Department of Energy [DOE], is launching a new research center in partnership with the Indian government, bankrolled in part by the DOE.

It’s UC Berkeley’s latest imperial adventure, which already includes partnerships in Saudi Arabia,  China, and Russia.

While the new India project includes agrofuels, that aspect of the venture isn’t headed by Cal, which already has a $50 million partnership with BP and a host of other ventures launched as spinoffs, three of them by the lab’s Jay Keasling, who also runs the Joint BioEnergy Institute.

From the lab’s Julie Chao:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been selected to lead a new joint U.S.-India research center focusing on energy efficiency technologies for buildings. It is one of three consortia that will make up the U.S.-India Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center (JCERDC). Together, these three groups will receive a total of $5 million this year from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop clean energy technologies.

Berkeley Lab’s U.S.-India Joint Center for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD) will conduct research with Indian counterparts focused on the integration of information technology with building systems in commercial and high-rise residential buildings. This area offers enormous potential for reducing energy use in both countries and is of particular importance in India, which experiences critical shortages in its energy supply coupled with booming demand.

“The rate of urbanization in India is mind-boggling—they will essentially add a new Chicago every year,” said Ashok Gadgil, who is head of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and will be director of CBERD. “Here India has an opportunity to leapfrog other countries and build cities with a new generation of high-performance buildings. This collaboration between two of the world’s largest economies can not only spur technology breakthroughs but also create new market opportunities for U.S. companies.”

CBERD’s portion of the funding is $1.25 million in the first year, with the same amount in the next four years pending Congressional approval. Berkeley Lab will collaborate with a number of third-party partners—which include Biodiversity Conservation, California Energy Commission, Honeywell, Infosys, Ingersoll Rand/Trane, Philips, Schneider Electric, Synapsense, The Weidt Group, Autodesk, Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium, City of San Jose, Delphi, enLighted, HOK Architects, Lighting Research Center, Lighting Science, Nexant and Natural Resources Defense Council—some of whom will provide matching funding and in-kind contributions.

Other academic members of the CBERD consortium are Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The lead Indian institution is Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University-Ahmedabad.

The JCERDC arises out of an agreement signed between President Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2009 to accelerate the research and deployment of clean energy projects. The Indian government plans to allocate $25 million to JCERDC over five years. The other two consortia in JCERDC will focus on biofuels (led by the University of Florida) and solar energy (led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with participation by Berkeley Lab).

Read the rest.

Synthetic biology, Berkeley’s new lab, land grabs

Two videos from the sponsors of the 28 March conference “Unmasking the Bay Area Bio Lab and Synthetic Biology: Health, Justice and Communities at Risk.”

We’ve previously reported on the conference, organized by activists to raise profound questions about the plans of UC Berkeley and the Department of Energy to create a sprawling new second campus for Lawrence National Laboratory on the nearby Richmond shoreline.

First up is a video of the press conference held the day before the conference and featuring some of the speakers who would appear the following night, including Marcy Darnovsky of Center For Genetics and Biology, Jim Thomas of ETC Group, Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director of Environmental Action Rights Nigeria, Gopal Dayaneni with Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project, Becky McClain with Injured Workers National Network IWNN, Steve Zeltzer with California Coalition For Workers Memorial Day, and moderated by Jeff Conant of The Global Justice Ecology Project.

And here’s an extended interview with Nnimmo Bassey conducted by Steve Zeltzer of the California Coalition For Workers Memorial Day.

Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International, is the 2010 of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award — often called the Alternate Nobel Prize because it is awarded by the Swedish legislature the day before the Nobels are handed out in the same city, Stockholm. The prize is given for “working on practical and exemplary solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the world today.”

Much of Bassey’s work has centered on the devastation wrought on his country by oil companies like Chevron, which “has sunk its claws and talons into Richmond,” and, like Shell, BP, and other oil companies is moving into agrofuels.

He addresses issues ranging from rapacious oil companies to the ongoing corporate land grabs underway in the global South by corporateers of the North as they gain control of vast acreages to grow crops to convert to fuel for the internal combustion engines of the north.

Videos of the full conference are also available online from Synbiowatch:

Part One.

Part Two.

Cal’s priorities: Bears football trumps midterms

With several hundred million invested in the retrofit of California Memorial Stadium and construction of the adjacent high tech gym, UC Berkeley wants nothing to get in the way of the extravaganza they’ve got planned when the stadium hosts its groundbreaking first game in the facility.

Well, maybe groundbreaking isn’t the right word, since that’s the last thing they hope happens on a facility that’s located directly over the earthquake fault federal scientists say in the most likely site of the San Francisco Bay Area’s next major earthquake.

And by directly over we mean just that: The Hayward fault literally splits the two sets of goalposts.

The university spent by our estimate around $400 million on the complex, and was forced to fight a major legal battle waged by neighbors and environmentalists who challenged the costly project. The scheduled demolition of an adjacent decades-old oak grove also spawned the longest urban tree-sit in U.S. history.

Now, with the stadium nearly done, the university doesn’t want anything to stand in the way of the facilities inaugural game in November — not even midterm exams.

Here’s the email sent out to faculty Monday:

Dear Colleagues,

On Friday, November 2, 2012, the Cal football team will host a home game in Memorial Stadium.  Although a specific kickoff time has not been announced, the game is expected to start in the early evening.

You may already be planning your syllabus for the fall semester, and if you are scheduled to teach that Friday afternoon, we want to assure you that all classes will proceed as regularly scheduled.  However, as you plan your syllabus, we encourage you to avoid scheduling anything out of the ordinary on November 2nd, such as a mid-term exam or other special activity.  Since the campus will be busier than usual, with more demands than normal on students’ attention, we hope you will consider conducting exams or other special activities in the class meeting preceding or following November 2nd.  The Registrar’s Office has also been notified that evening exams should not be scheduled on November 2nd, so classroom requests on that day will be handled differently.

Normally available parking and transportation for faculty, staff and students will be accessible during the day, as football ticket holders will be directed to park at off-campus sites or use public transit options that will be expanded on Friday afternoon and evening.  Intercollegiate Athletics is continuing to refine a transportation solution to accommodate the large crowd expected to arrive on campus for the game and will share the strategy with the campus community once it is finalized.

With careful planning, we hope to minimize the impact on the regularly scheduled activities of the campus during this event, and we will continue to communicate about this as we get closer to the game.  In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact Cynthia Schrager in the Office of Teaching, Learning, Academic Planning & Facilities (schrager@berkeley.edu).

Best regards,

Bob Jacobsen, Academic Senate Chair
Catherine P. Koshland, Vice Provost-Teaching, Learning, Academic Planning & Facilities

Isn’t it nice to see that Cal has its priorities straight?

Nothing should get in the way of the game, not even learning.

Drug resistance, Berkeley, and the biobuckaroos

When Bill Gates bankrolled UC Berkelely “bioengineer” Jay Keasling to launch corporate genetic engineering firm Amyris, Gates’s professed goal was the creation of a cheap antimalarial drug to replace the plant derivative armtemisin.

Produced from the wormwood plant Artemisia, the drug is the most widely used compound to clear the body of the parasite which causes the devastating tropical killer.

Gates and Amyris founder Jay Keasling announced they would create the drug from a genetically tweaked intestinal microbe, producing a product that would radically reduce the price to consumers in Africa and Asia.

By the time they had turned over the process to pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis for non-profit commercial production, any thought of “cheaper” had vanished. The chemical will sell for the same price as the naturally derived product, while potentially devastating the lives of peasant farmers who currently produce enough of the crop to meet all current needs.

But the Big Pharma player would get access to more markets, and their representatives could peddle other for-profit drugs — a win for Sanofi-Aventis, but a loss for thousands of peasant farmers.

Amyris went on to repurpose itself as an agrofuel company, partnering with French oil giant Total to launch pilot programs in Brazil, where sugar cane is the feedstock of choice — a crop that relies of massive land-clearing efforts, including newly designated sites in the Amazon rain forest.

While Keasling promised that “scaling up” programs from the realm of the experimental to full-scale refineries wouldn’t be a problem, reality intervened, and production plans have been, er, scaled down, leaving the company for now in the role of a supplier of chemicals to the cosmetics industry while Amyris stock has plunged from a high of $33.85 last year to as low as $4 on Thursday.

And now comes word of an alarming development that could be bad news both for the Amyris not-so-cheap artmesinin as well as for the Third World’s wormwood farmers.

Resistance discovered in Southeast Asia

A new study by a team of medical scientists from Thailand, Britain, and the United States just published in The Lancet, Britain’s premiere medical journal, reports that strains of Plasmodium falciparum — the parasite responsible for the ravages of malaria — have emerged in Cambodia and are spreading to Western Thailand and Myanmar.

To quote from the report’s conclusion:

Genetically determined artemisinin resistance in P falciparum emerged along the Thailand—Myanmar border at least 8 years ago and has since increased substantially. At this rate of increase, resistance will reach rates reported in western Cambodia in 2—6 years.

The World Health Organization reported on the emergence of resistance two years ago:

“If we do not put a stop to the drug-resistant malaria situation that has been documented in the Thai-Cambodia border, it could spread rapidly to neighbouring countries and threaten our efforts to control this deadly disease,” said Dr Hiroki Nakatani, Assistant Director-General of WHO.

Resistance along the Thai-Cambodia border started with chloroquine, followed by resistance to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine and mefloquine, drugs used in malaria control several years ago.

Malaria poses a risk to half of the world’s population and more than one million people die of the disease each year. The malaria map, or the area where it is prevalent, has been reduced considerably over the past 50 years, but the disease has defied elimination in areas of intense transmission.

Bryan Walsh of Time has more on the latest developments:

In another study published in Science, researchers at Texas Biomed and their colleagues managed to get close to isolating the genes in the malaria parasite that convey resistance to artemisinin. That will help scientists understand how artemisinin interacts with the parasite, and how resistance takes place over time. In the future, it may even offer clues on how to alter treatment to cancel out resistance — to adapt to the parasite’s adaptation. “Mapping the geographical spread of resistance can be particularly challenging using existing clinical and parasitological tools,” Texas Biomed’s Dr. Tim Anderson said in a statement. “If we can identify the genetic determinants of artemisinin resistance, we should be able to confirm potential cases of resistance more rapidly. This could be critically importing for limiting further spread of resistance.”

Drug resistance is inevitable — the more a treatment is used, the faster resistance will often develop, and the fact is that there are some 250 million cases of malaria a year. The only hope is to try to root out resistant-malaria where it occurs, and stop the chain of resistant transmission. That was hard enough in Cambodia, but with drug-resistant malaria spreading to Thailand and likely Burma as well — a desperately poor nation with a threadbare medical system — it will only get tougher. And if resistant malaria spreads to Africa, where the disease is still a catastrophe, perhaps millions more could die, as Francois Nosten of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit in Thailand put it:

We are in a race against time to control malaria in these regions before drug resistance worsens and develops and spreads further. The effect of that happening could be devastating. Malaria already kills hundreds of thousands of people a year — if our drugs become ineffective, this figure will rise dramatically.

Read the rest.

So what’s the takeaway?

One clear conclusion from all this is that the panglossian pronouncements of the “bioengineers” and their financial backers must always be taken with a grain or ten of sodium chloride.

Consider this from Jay Keasling, reported by Megan Molteni in Richmond Confidential:

Keasling’s lab recently used yeast that would normally produce ethanol (like the yeast used in beer brewing) and engineered it to instead produce artemisinin—an effective anti-malarial drug currently produced from expensive plant sources. Through partnerships and licensing agreements with drug and chemical companies Sanofi-Aventis and Amyris, Keasling said more than 100 million people per year will get access to the drug that otherwise wouldn’t have it available.

A hundred million people who don’t have access?

While supply and demand of artemisin are almost equally matched at the moment, the price of the drug has been falling, which is one reason higher than predicted costs for the Amyris-created product won’t have any impact on the consumer but could have devastating impacts on farmers.

A2S2, the Assured Amyris Supply System, was created specifically to support the farming system which still produces all the world’s supply of the drug to ensure that current needs are met.

Bill Gates, the sugar daddy behind Amyris, is also a major player in the agrofuels industry — and had major holdings in another company which has partnered with another enterprise founded by Keasling, the Joint BioEnergy Institute [JBEI], created by the Department of Energy and run by UC Berkeley in partnership with a joint partnership of UC Berkeley with Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories and the Carnegie Institute.

Pacific Ethanol is a corporate partner of of JBEI, and Gates held 20 percent of the stock in the Sacramento-based ethanol refiner until the shares tanked in 2008.

Gates hasn’t bought into Amyris since the stock went public. Perhaps he learned something.

JBEI continues to run at full steam, but its venue would change from its current location in Emeryville [upstairs from the headquarters of Amyris] to the new Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory billion-dollar-plus complex in nearby Richmond if the lab wins approval at the site — which has a century-long history of contamination by toxic industrial waste, another subject we reported on extensively back in our days with the Berkeley Daily Planet.

Oh, and by the way, UC Berkeley fought a successful call by the Richmond City Council for oversight of the toxic waste cleanup of the site by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.

UCB campus rally 9 April to support ‘Sproul 13′

The 13 are the dozen students and Professor Celeste Langan facing criminal charges after the 9 November police riot during the breakup of the Occupy encampment outside Sproul Hall.

For updates on the criminal cases, which were filed after campus police exerted some back room political pressure on the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, see here.

Here’s the poster for , via reclaim UC: