Dreaming in MONSANTO

7/30/2019 Dreaming in MONSANTO

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GREGORY PALAST

Dreaming inMonsantoEditors who defy governmen t censorship fall flat on their back swhen faced with powerful commercial interests

The declassified memo dated 18 November 1997 from Dr IanAlexander to his staff states: 'Dr Kowalczyk indicated that he hadreceived a copy of the JECFA package for review from Dr Nick Weber.'Kowalczyk is head of regulatory affairs for Monsanto Company, thebiogenetics giant. Weber works for the U S Food & DrugAdministration. Alexander directs Canada's Bureau of Veterinary D rugs.The memo was the first indication that Monsanto had received copies ofa confidential critique of the company's hormone, bovine somatotropin(BST), from the secret proceedings of the Joint Economic Co mmitteeon Food Additives.JECFA advises the Codex Alimentarius whose decisions, in turn,affect whether, under international trade agreements, the USA couldforce Europe to accept BST-produced milk products. Weber had specialaccess to the JECFA docum ents.Monsanto and its allies used their advance knowledge of critics'confidential reports, including the positions of the EuropeanCom munity's Food and Agriculture Directorate, to prepare for thedecision-making m eeting of JECFA set for February 1998 in R om e.For Monsanto, this was a high-stakes meeting. The drug at issue,BST, increases a cow's milk output by 15 per cent. It has also increasedMonsanto s annual revenues by an estimated US$500,000 annually in theUS market, and an unknown amount in the black market in Europewhere BST remains banned pend ing review by health officials.The company took no chances. According to Alexander's notes of aphone call with Kowalczyk on 27 August, obtained under Canada's62 INDEX ON CENSORSH IP 3 1 9 9 9


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Access to Information law, the Monsanto operative suggested thatCanada place Dr Len Ritter on the JECFA panel. It was done.Ritter would not be alone in making the case for Monsanto. DrMargaret Miller of the US Food & Drug Administration was assigned towrite up the official decision and summary of the closed JECFA debate.Prior to joining government, Miller ran a Monsanto laboratory analysingBST, a fact unknown to the FDA's commissioner during the agency'sreview for the drug approval. Weber, who passed the document toMonsanto, works at FDA under Miller.Miller's report was much to the company's liking. Nevertheless,M onsanto s Kowalczyk saw s torm clouds rising. His 8 June 1998 fax toWeber and industry competitors notes that Dr Michael Hansen, anadviser to the JECFA, 'does not agree with the conclusions of theJECFA summary report'.He certainly did not. Hansen wrote that test data suggested BSTcould cause breast and prostate cancers in hum ans. T he test was old but,to Hansen, the data was new and disturbing. The test consisted of a 90-day study of rats fed BST. Monsanto's report that the rats suffered 'notoxicologically significant changes' became the corners tone of the U SFDA's quick approval of the hormone in 1993. The US agency refusedto release the study's data on the grounds it would harm Monsanto'scommercial interests.Indeed, it would have. A fourth of the rats showed signs of anti-bodyreaction to BST. Some had cysts. None of this was known until, afteryears of requests, Canadian government scientists finally obtained thedata.Maybe they wish they hadn't. The six Canadian veterinarianresearchers who told their superiors about the politely termed 'gaps' inthe Monsanto data found themselves reassigned, demoted and silenceduntil last year, when Canada's Senate provided parliamentary imm unityfor their testimony.Monsanto had other worries. US government approval did nottranslate into public acceptance of genetically modified foods.Consumers preferred milk products labelled 'BST-free'.In 1994, the Food & Drug Administration's deputy commissioner,Michael Taylor, signed a regulation effectively banning food cartons fromdeclaring that products did not contain the hormone. Prior to joininggovernment, Taylor was a partner in the law firm that represented

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M onsanto. He has now left government to w ork directly in M onsanto'sWashington office.

L ately, I've been dreaming in Monsanto. Given that I've beeninvestigating the commercialisation of science for the LondonObserver, it is no surprise such dreams may come. But, when the cowschatter about their somatic cell counts, I wake up, worried.Why? The BST story contains the standard list of conflicts of interest,regulatory manipulation and back-door lobbying that are the typical stuffof my beat, corporate America. But there was something especiallybothersome about the Monsanto tales.The key was in a minor side story I have not previously reported. On4 October 1989, three University of Sussex scientists received fromM onsanto a floppy disk with data on cows injected with BST. Thecompany's published 30-week study reported no ill effects of theho rm on e. But the Sussex group found 50 weeks of data on the disk.Adding in the newly discovered data produced a far different result 'statistically significantly increased levels of somatic cells'. That is, therewas a lot of pus dripping from BST cow udders into the milk buckets.

The peer-review panel at Veterinary Record accepted theseextraordinary findings for publication. But Monsanto stoppedpublication, claiming the data was proprietary and secret. The. Journal ofDairy Science prepared to publish it, excluding raw data. Still Monsantokilled the paper's publication, already typeset. Finally, the British FoodJournal agreed to prin t the Sussex study - so long as the professors wouldindemnify the publisher, a financia l impossibility. By now, it was 1995and, while the refugee paper sought asylum, Monsanto obtained USFDA approval of the drug (1993). The study remains unpublished.It was Monsanto's reasoning for denying the Sussex study review bythe scientific community that vexes my cow dreams. Monsanto's DrD ou g Hard wrote: 'As the raw data are confidential all subsequentanalyses are as w el l' For the first time, a corpora tion had no t onlyclaimed control over data of commercial value, but also successfullyasserted control over opinions about the data, control over the terms,forum and information open to debate. If Monsanto can bar a scientistfrom citing company data, or discussing it in learned journals, then noresearcher can effectively challenge Monsanto without its approval.

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corporate ownership of thought processes, turning discourse and debateinto property that can be fenced, enclosed and guarded. My data-talkingdream cows had caused me to trespass on Monsanto property.The public fears that biogenetics will produce Frankenstein products- apples that will devour Devon. But the deeper threat of biogeneticeng ineering is this massive expansion of censorship required for the newindustry to succeed. Monsanto is the perfect McLuhan company. Its trueproduct is information. That the information is imprinted inside a seedor bacterium's D N A, as opposed to new sprint or web page, is notsignificant. Its profitability resides in its maintaining a lock-down hold onthis information, and that must include power over debate andexamination of the data.From an informational and legal point of view, genetically modifiedproducts depart radically from functionally similar products modifiedthrough natural methods. A Monsanto press hack was quick to explainthis to me this year when Pioneer Hi-Bred Corporation accusedMonsanto of'genetic misappropriation', of extracting DNA codes fromHi-Bred corn seed for use in Monsanto's own seed. Monsanto's actionseemed a wee hypocritical in the light of its own well-known campaignof withering lawsuits against farmers who plant seeds descended fromMonsanto-bred crops.Not so, explained Monsanto's spokeswoman, 'We have done nothingillegal.' Hi-Bred used the age-old method of creating the new seed:cross-breeding. Farmers have bred seed for millennia, and anyone is freeto take from the seeds the information placed there, ultimately, byNature. Nature's data are free and open to study, debate and analysis byany student of the physical world.Looking at Monsanto as an information enterprise, rather than anindustrial one, explains its regulatory lobbying practices as a consistentextension of its science. Its lobby effort was aimed at obtaining an earlylook at the studies of BST critics, placing former (and future) employeesin key regulatory listening posts, blocking labelling of geneticallymodified foods and burying health-effects data under commercialinterest claims. The paradigm is control of the flow of information, dataand analysis: who can speak and when; what is revealed and what

concealed.On the other side is Hansen, whose confidential report fell intoMonsanto's hands. His battle is as much for open information as it is for

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blocking this particular hormone. Hansen did not complain thatMonsanto saw his commentary but that the company did not make itsown reports simultaneously available to him and other researchers. AndHansen objects to JECFA's secrecy rules which bar him from sharingwith other scientists and the public the give and take of the technicaldiscussions.Not all of the control is subtle. In 1997, a Florida television stationowned by Murdoch's Fox network looked into the BST controversy.Two well-known reporters spent nearly a year developing their shortnews broadcast. When they refused to accept the seventieth rewrite ofthe script, they were fired. They have not worked since.X TONaipaul said of imperial powers, 'They don't lie. They elide.' It isV v j t h e information hidden from view, the facts removed fromdebate that can colour black as white, oppression as freedom, infection ashealth.In m uch of the world this valuable tool, censorship, remains agovernm ent monopoly. To protect their interests from dissent, somegovernments reserve to themselves ownership of ideas; they are thelandlords of discourse. Happily, there are editors who would choose jailrather than change a word of print if the demand comes from agovernment censor. Yet these same editors will slash news reports, spiketelevision productions or pulp entire journals based on a single note fromMonsanto or merely the fear of one.What we see in Monsanto s controlling exposure of informationabout their products is the new trend toward privatisation of censorship.Privatised censorship is the by-product of biogenetics, as closed debate isthe only guarantor of the commercial value of its secrets, irreversiblychanging the nature of scientific investigation and discourse. Gregory Palast is a New York-based expert on industry regulation andinvestigative reporter. His column, 'Inside Corporate America,' appears fortnightlyin the Observer of London

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I was a press censor for MonsantoI n western Europe, the most invidious form of censorship is self-censorship. Its minor evil is in hoodwinking readers into believingthey have shared the author's full story; its greater evil in perpetuatingthe pleasant myth that we live in societies where free expression andopen discourse are untrammelled.So to those of you w ho read my fortnightly column in the Observer,or have read my stories of lobbying in Britain, it's time I levelled withyou: you've never read the full story. I can't rem ember a report yet that Ihave not cut, fudged, excised, snipped or noodled at the request oflawyers for the Guardian Media Group.Take the Monsanto story. When I first reported that US officialspassed confidential European regulatory documents to the corporation, Iagreed to remove a side story about allegations of bribery in Canada.Lawyers convinced me that this report could draw a financiallyburdensome suit, though we would certainly win in court. I could notsee the value of jeopardising my paper over the matter, so I said, 'C ut it.'

This is no slur on the Observer nor our sister rag, the Guardian. N oother newspaper group would dare print the Monsanto story at all.The terrible thing is, the public is ignorant. They've been cheated ofthe whole truth like buying a short-weighted loaf of bread. Worse, theLondon reader, unlike the reader in Pakistan, is falsely reassured thatthere is no censor snipping out sections of copy.But some journalists u nder dictatorships have the blessing of leaving ablank space in the paper as a signal of official censorship. So I havesuggested the following to my editor-in-chief: that British editions ofour paper leave paragraphs empty, marked only, 'Copy removed onadvice of counsel fearful of legal action by Monsanto (or BP orwhomever)'.As to the Monsanto Information sliced from my Observer report: itwas printed the following week - in the Observer. Lawyers, likegovernment censors, have their moods. GP

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Dreaming in MONSANTO