Genetically Modified Crops (Forum) (Letter to the Editor‪)‬

In their excellent "Agricultural Biotechnology: Overregulated and Underappreciated" (Issues, Winter 2005), Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko lay out a compelling argument in support of ag biotech. I agree with their principal conclusions. However, I must set the record straight on one item in their piece that seems to have become an enduring myth about the early days of the science. They state that "some corporations ... lobbied for excessive and discriminatory government regulation ... they knew that the time and expense engendered by overregulation would also act as a barrier to market entry by smaller companies." Monsanto, DuPont, and Ciba-Geigy (now Syngenta) were listed in the article as the short-sighted companies that brought long-lasting restrictive regulations. In reality, only Monsanto argued for regulation; the other companies were not then significant players in the field. I was CEO of Monsanto in 1983 when our scientists for the first time put a foreign gene into a plant, which started the commercial path to the science. My job for the dozen years before first commercialization was to ensure funding for this far-future science. Wall Street hated something that might pay out in the mid-1990s--if ever. Even within Monsanto, there were quarrels about R & D resources being siphoned away from more traditional research, especially toward research that might never succeed. Besides, even if it did, it would face the avalanche of opposition sure to come from "tinkering with Mother Nature." Consider: We were only a few years away from the Asilomar conference, which had debated that perhaps this "bioengineering" should be left stillborn. Rachel Carson had warned of science gone amok. Superfund had been enacted to clean up hazardous waste from science-based companies. A little later, an ambitious researcher in California had grown genetically modified strawberries on a lab rooftop, causing a furor by violating the rules at that time, which forbade outdoor testing. Pressure was mounting, as one opponent put it, "to test the science until it proved risk-free, since the scientists obviously couldn't self-police." "How long should we test?" I asked the opponent. "Oh, for about 20 years" was the response.