LIFE FOR SALE: THE BIRTH OF LIFE SCIENCE COMPANIES - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 143

distributors, and chemical manufactures. The pressure to grow and become more profitable also led to an
alignment with pharmaceutical companies. Bryan Bergeron and Paul Chan explain in their topic on the
industry: “The primary means of growth is acquiring seed companies in order to directly access the seed
market. Because seed companies ultimately decide which biotechnology to incorporate into their product
lines, without a captive seed company, there is no guarantee that an agricultural biotech company will be
able to bring its technology to market.” 13
Monsanto, the world's largest producer of genetically engineered seed, with ownership of 674 agri-
cultural patents, has become the dominant player and the symbol of the industry. It was founded in St.
Louis, Missouri, in 1901 by John Francis Queeny, who was a buyer for Meyer Brothers Drug Company,
and thus he was familiar with the drug and chemical industry. He married well, naming the company after
his wealthy father-in-law, Mendes de Monsanto, a sugar financier from St. Thomas. According to a 1936
article in Time , “He figured he had sold enough remedies and condiments to be able to make money man-
ufacturing them. . . . He gave the company his wife's name because he planned to keep on peddling drugs
under his own.” 14
Monsanto first produced saccharin—a derivative of coal tar that had been discovered accidently by a
researcher at Johns Hopkins University and was later in the twentieth century linked to bladder cancer.
Monsanto began as the major supplier of saccharin, caffeine, and vanillin to Coca-Cola—a prophetic alli-
ance in hindsight.
While Monsanto had begun marketing agricultural chemicals in 1945, it got into agrochemicals in a
larger way with the introduction of 2.4-D and, as a result, created an Agricultural Division in 1960. This
jump-started the company's production of herbicides—Ramrod in 1964 and Lasso in 1968. Monsanto's
cell biology research program, the start of its research into genetic engineering, began in 1975 in reaction
to the publicity around Boyer and Cohen's discovery of how to splice genes.
The herbicide Roundup was commercialized in 1976, and by 1981 Monsanto had changed its strategic
focus to concentrate on biotechnology and established a molecular biology group. The company started
pouring money into research on the use of recombinant DNA technology to transfer genetic material from
one organism to another to add desirable traits.
As a result, Monsanto became the first company to genetically modify a plant cell. Monsanto's search
for their golden apple was based on its desire to develop herbicide-tolerant seeds that would allow Roundup
to kill weeds without harming the crops in the same field.
Biotechnology challenges traditional breeding methods for desirable crop and livestock traits. It is dif-
ferent than the traditional selective breeding of plants over many generations within the same plant species
until the desirable trait manifests itself. At this time, splicing genes is a very expensive business that re-
quires state-of-the-art laboratories and highly paid scientists. Monsanto needed a great deal of money to
execute its strategic plan.
Monsanto's search for a company with guaranteed profits resulted in the purchase of the maker of Nut-
raSweet, G.D. Searle, in 1985. It seemed like a good match, because the drug company also had an exper-
ienced sales and marketing staff. But by 1988, Searle was the focus of hundreds of lawsuits and a flood
of bad publicity because of its intrauterine device (IUD), the Copper-7, which killed or injured hundreds
of women. Incidentally, Donald Rumsfeld, who was secretary of defense in the 1970s under Gerald Ford
and again in 2001 under George W. Bush, ran Searle between 1976 and 1985. According to Washington,
D.C., attorney Jim Turner, Rumsfeld said in a 1981 sales meeting that he would push to get the artificial
sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet) approved within the year, using his political clout. While serving as a
member of Ronald Reagan's transition team, he recommended Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. to lead the FDA,
which soon thereafter approved the sweetener.