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486 4 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6580 science.org SCIENCE
nonprofit research group—claimed many
egregious errors and called for a retraction.
The analysis accused Newmaster of not un-
derstanding that supplements use benign
inactive substances such as rice powder as
“carriers,” and that DNA can be destroyed
during processing without altering a supple-
ment’s effects.
Newmaster and his co-authors offered a
solution to the problem they had identified.
“We suggest that the herbal industry should
voluntarily embrace DNA barcoding,” they
wrote in the paper, to give companies “a com-
petitive advantage as they could advertise
that they produce an authentic, high quality
product.” CBG scientist Masha Kuzmina, who
cosigned the allegations against Newmaster,
says the message was: “The paper is out. It’s
[a] scandal. Now there is a problem and it
needs to be solved. And who’s solving it? The
same person” who exposed the problem.
Although the paper claimed “no compet-
ing interests,” Newmaster and UG geneticist
Robert Hanner in 2012 had created Biological
ID Technologies Inc., which conducted DNA
barcoding for foods and herbal products and
offered purity certifications for product la-
bels. On 11 July 2013, about 1 week after the
paper was submitted, Newmaster and Hanner
incorporated a second company, named Tru-
ID, which apparently assumed the business
initiated by Biological ID Technologies. (Tru-
ID folded in 2020, under “financial hardship
during the pandemic,” Newmaster said in
his response to the misconduct complaint.
Hanner would not provide any comment for
this article.)
When the New York attorney general’s
probe triggered by Newmaster’s paper pres-
sured companies to validate their ingredi-
ents, Tru-ID was ready to help, says Stefan
Gafner, chief science officer at the Ameri-
can Botanical Council and co-author of the
HerbalEGram critique. At least three major
supp lementmakers, Nature’s Way, Herbalife
Nutrition, and Jamieson, hired Tru-ID and
adopted its certifications. (The company
also received more than $369,000 in con-
tributions and contracts from the Canadian
government.) “The whole way [Newmaster]
would talk about DNA was really a marketing
pitch for the industry. And eventually, he got
a lot of success,” Gafner says.
In the years after the paper was published,
Newmaster acknowledged that critics had
been partially correct. His methods could not
accurately measure the components of herbal
remedies, largely because DNA barcoding
cannot distinguish varying amounts of dif-
ferent substances in a mixed sample, and be-
cause DNA degrades during processing.
NHPRA, the UG-based alliance
Newmaster launched in 2017, aimed to im-
prove practices in the nascent field, in part
by combining DNA barcoding with other
approaches. The website of UG’s office of
alumni affairs and development says the
university is “raising $20 million to create
new verification standards and develop
new technology” through NHPRA and of-
fers sponsorship levels from $25,000 to
$1 million. Several big industry players have
joined; Tru-ID also committed $500,000.
UG repeatedly touted Newmaster’s work
in press releases and pushed back when
that work was challenged. In 2017, Jonathan
Newman, then-dean of the College of Bio-
logical Sciences, called UG scientists Evgeny
Zakharov and Natalia Ivanova into his of-
fice for what Zakharov sarcastically calls a“friendly discussion.” The two scientists had
indirectly questioned Newmaster’s work at a
conference, noting that DNA barcoding alone
can’t always reliably identify ingredients in
herbal products. Newman admonished them
to avoid comments that might sour NHPRA
contributors, says Zakharov, who is lab direc-
tor for the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcod-
ing. “I said to Newman, ‘Are you sure you
are backing the right horse?’” Zakharov says.
“Newman’s response was: ‘You’re not the one
who brought me a $1 million deal.’”
Ivanova, who’s now at a Guelph biomoni-
toring company, confirms the conversation
and says Newman contacted her again later
that year for a similar talk, also attended by
Glen Van Der Kraak, who became interim
dean in 2019. “I felt that I could not say no”
to the requests, Ivanova says. The encounter
gave her “the feeling that every step is beingwatched for any critique towards technolo-
gies used by Newmaster’s lab.”
Newman, now vice president for research
at Wilfrid Laurier University, says he con-
nected Newmaster with Herbalife and sup-
ported his fundraising. He says he did not tell
the duo what to say in public but asked them
not to solicit companies Newmaster was
courting. (Zakharov and Ivanova say they
had never engaged in fundraising.) Van Der
Kraak declined to comment.
More commercial ventures followed, in
a network that is hard to disentangle. In
2019 or 2020, Newmaster became a science
adviser to Purity-IQ, a startup that, like
Tru-ID, aims to certify the ingredients of
foods, herbs, wine, cannabis, and other co-
mestibles. According to Purity-IQ’s website,
NHPRA performs lab tests for the company,
which pledged $1 million to NHPRA in 2021.
After the COVID-19 pandemic broke
out, Newmaster cofounded ParticleOne,
which sells software to assess indoor air for
SARS-CoV-2. He is an adviser to Songbird
Life Science, which offers COVID-19 tests
and shares technology and executives with
ParticleOne and Purity-IQ. (All three com-
panies declined to comment, except to say
concerns about Newmaster did not involve
their own work, and in Purity-IQ’s case, that
it stands by its tests.)
Newmaster developed close ties with one
sponsor, Herbalife, despite its checkered his-
tory. Herbalife paid a $200 million fine in
2016 to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal
Trade Commission that it was operating a
sophisticated pyramid scheme, and another
$123 million in 2020 to settle federal charges
that it engaged in bribery and other corrupt
acts in China. Newmaster has touted Herb-
alife’s products in promotional materials,
effusively praised its cultivation practices
after a 2018 visit to a Chinese tea farm, and
lauded its efforts “to achieve excellence.” He
also came to the company’s defense in 2019,
when Indian researchers published a paper
in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Hepatology about a woman who died from
liver failure, which the researchers associated
with her use of Herbalife dieting products.
In a letter to the editor, Newmaster—who
has no medical background—castigated the
paper. (Elsevier, the publisher, removed the
paper from its website in 2020 after legal
threats from Herbalife.)
Web pages featuring Newmaster disap-
peared from Herbalife’s website last month,
after Science contacted the company. Herb-
alife would not provide any comment for
this story.EVEN AS NEWMASTER’S star was rising,
some of his colleagues complained that he
made exaggerated claims. Newmaster never PHOTO: JUSSI PUIKKONEN“The university has chosen
to stand back for
reasons that I don’t understand.”
Paul Hebert, University of Guelph