a reporter at large 

the pharmageddon riddle
Did Monsanto just want more profits, 
or did it want to save the world?
april 10, 2000


1.

     Each fall, the environmental group Greenpeace holds a conference,
in an effort to make its priorities as clear to corporate executives
and investors as they are to its two and a half million members.
The gathering, at a London hotel, is a chance for one of the world's
most determined environmental organizations to remind skeptics
about its goals, and to let people know what it is willing to
do to achieve them.  For its latest event, in October, the organizers
had scheduled appearances by the two principal antagonists in
one of the most unsettling issues of our age: the production and
use of genetically modified foods.

     No controversy--nuclear power, global warming, or even the
eerie possibility of cloning human beings--occupies a larger space
in that disturbing arena where science, social values, and commerce
collide.  Lord Peter Melchett, an organic farmer and a former Labour
minister, who has led Greenpeace's efforts to stop the use of
biotechnology in agriculture, was enlisted to debate Robert B.
Shapiro, the chairman and C.E.O.  of the international conglomerate
Monsanto, who is the technology's chief evangelist.  It was a perfect
moment for such a conversation: genetically modified foods, with
few labels to identify them, have become the most widely adopted
products in modern farming history.  A decade ago, no transgenic
crops were commercially available anywhere on earth; in 1995,
four million acres had been planted; by 1999, that number had
grown to a hundred million.  In the United States, half of the
enormous soybean crop and more than a third of the corn are the
products of biotechnology.  

     Shapiro believes that altering the seeds of soybeans, beets,
and cotton to resist herbicides is the barest beginning of what
he and many others consider a revolution in agriculture, food,
and, ultimately, human health.  This new science, he says, is the
principal reason that "there now exists an opportunity to
create a genuine science of nutrition, something that has never
existed in human history."  But, where Monsanto sees unlimited
promise, Greenpeace has found little more than profit motive and
peril.  In Europe, and particularly in the United Kingdom, opposition
to agricultural biotechnology has become almost a religion--one
endorsed vigorously by Prince Charles.  "I happen to believe
that this kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms
that belong to God, and to God alone," he has said.  Lord
Melchett, for his part, will stand trial this week for mowing
down an experimental government crop of genetically modified maize,
in Norfolk, not far from his estate.

     Just a few days before the conference, Shapiro called to say
that he couldn't make it.  Instead, his image was beamed from America
onto a video screen.  Shapiro appeared grim, defensive, and defeated.
After more than a year of protests, Europe was shutting Monsanto
out of its markets.  So, for the most part, was Brazil.  Two of
Monsanto's biggest competitors--the Swiss pharmaceutical giant
Novartis and the British drug-maker AstraZeneca--were about to
combine their agricultural divisions into one business and sell
it, essentially abandoning their involvement in crop biotechnology.
Japanese companies had decided to stop using genetically altered
products, and Mexico's largest tortilla-maker had ended its reliance
on modified corn.  Under pressure from Greenpeace, Novartis stopped
using genemodified soy and corn in its Gerber brand of baby food.
Heinz announced it would do the same.

     By last fall, the tension in Europe had spread to America.
A highly publicized--though very preliminary--report from a researcher
at Cornell suggested that the eggs of monarch butterflies (the
great fluttering pandas of the insect world) might not survive
on the pollen of modified corn.  American farmers began to fear
that European ports would send their tankers full of grain back
to sea, and late last summer the world's most prominent miller--Archer
Daniels Midland--instructed its confused and disheartened clients
to segregate modified crops from all others and haul them to market
in separate containers.  In November, the Food and Drug Administration
was set to begin its first full series of hearings on the use
and safety of genetically altered foods.

     Shapiro's faith in the technology remained absolute, though.
He told the Greenpeace audience that without biotechnology farmers
would never meet the world's rapidly growing demand for food.
At the same time, Shapiro was surprisingly contrite, sounding
like one of those Chinese leaders who during the Cultural Revolution
were made to walk through the streets in a dunce cap.  "Our
confidence in this technology and our enthusiasm for it has, I
think, widely been seen, and understandably so, as condescension
or indeed arrogance,'' he said.  "Because we thought it was
our job to persuade, too often we forgot to listen."

     Lord Melchett didn't know how to respond, so he delivered his
prepared remarks.  He said that Greenpeace was ready to join arms
with Monsanto if only the corporation would renounce its use of
agricultural biotechnology and embrace organic farming as the
principal solution to the world's crop needs.  It was a bit like
offering moral support to General Motors, if only the automobile-maker
would abandon the internal-combustion engine in favor of the bicycle.
At one point, Shapiro was asked if he felt like a bully imposing
unwanted foods upon the world.  "Well, if I'm a bully,'' he
replied dryly, "I certainly don't feel myself to be successful
at it."

2.

     The Monsanto Company, which was founded in St.  Louis in 1901,
became one of the world's most successful chemical concerns, starting
out with products like saccharin, aspirin, acrylic, and fertilizers,
and eventually selling PCBs, plastics, dioxin, and the defoliant
Agent Orange.  When Robert Shapiro took control of the company,
in 1995, it had more than twenty thousand employees in dozens
of countries.  Shapiro quickly made it clear that he intended to
start over.  Within three years, the company had spun off its chemical
operations and committed itself to biotechnology and a cleaner
world.  Its new, officially stated goal was to help people "lead
longer, healthier lives, at costs that they and their nations
can afford and without continued environmental degradation."

     Monsanto's herbicide Roundup has been one of its best-selling
products for more than twenty-five years.  In 1996, the company
introduced Roundup Ready seeds, which were engineered to resist
the herbicide, and the seeds have dominated every market in which
they are sold.  Under Shapiro's direction, Monsanto established
marketing agreements with some of its largest competitors in the
seed business; in other cases, it simply bought the company.  In
1996, Monsanto and DeKalb Genetics signed a contract to share
the licensing of corn and soybean seeds; the same year, Monsanto
bought Agracetus, a cotton-and-plant biotechnology company.  In
1997, Monsanto purchased the soybean company Asgrow Agronomics
and Holden's Foundation Seeds.  Monsanto also formed partnerships
with the giant grain company Cargill and with Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
which specializes in genomics and gene-sequencing technology.
By last year, after an eight-billion-dollar spree, Monsanto had
made a greater commitment to producing genetically modified crops
than any other organization in the world.  It seemed like a wise
investment.  Monsanto was not only leading the race for new genetically
engineered foods but its stock price had doubled.  Most analysts
on Wall Street predicted that the growth would continue.

     Shapiro, who is sixty-one, had ambitions that extended far
beyond selling seed to farmers.  When he took over the company,
he had looked at the four main strands of its business--agriculture,
pharmaceuticals, food, and chemicals--and decided that by abandoning
chemicals he could combine the other parts into one.  More clearly
than his competitors, he understood that common foods could reduce
cholesterol, that fruits could be turned into life-saving vaccines,
and that genetics could improve the staples that millions rely
on for daily sustenance.  A lawyer and a former urban-affairs professor,
Shapiro had become the unlikely Johnny Appleseed of genetic modification,
promoting his vision of a world where there are not simply foods
and drugs but foods that take the place of drugs.  "This is
an important moment in human history,'' Shapiro told me the first
time we met, in Monsanto's offices at Chicago's Merchandise Mart.
"The application of contemporary biological knowledge to
issues like food and nutrition and human health has to occur.
It has to occur for the same reasons that things have occurred
for the past ten millennia.  People want to live better, and they
will use the tools they have to do it.  Biology is the best tool
we have."

     In some ways, the shift wasn't all that profound: for centuries,
farmers have been saving seeds and breeding them over generations
to make better plants.  All the plants we eat (corn, wheat, potatoes,
rice) and many that we don't (orchids, roses, Christmas trees)
have been manipulated in an effort to make them last longer, flower
later, look better, taste sweeter, or grow more vigorously in
stubborn soil.  (Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale, for
example, all come from the same wild ancestor, although hundreds
of years of breeding have turned them into four entirely different
foods.) In the nineteenth century, Luther Burbank, America's first
great plant breeder, spent his life crossing the seedlings of
plants in order to create hybrids robust enough to thrive.  Gregor
Mendel's experiments with peas started to change all that.  He
proved that there was a system to inheritance.  Some traits are
more powerful than others, and those always win out.

     But modern agriculture, modern medicine, and the information
society itself didn't really begin until 1953, when James Watson
and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule,
which carries the information that cells need to build proteins,
and to live.  Today, it's as if scientists in half the laboratories
on earth spent their time cutting bits of DNA from one cell and
splicing them into others.  Nature may be random, but genetic modification
allows plant breeders to be specific.  

     This type of manipulation has long been accepted in medicine,
largely because the risks seem well contained and the benefits
easy to understand.  Insulin produced since 1983, for example,
has been largely based on a synthetic gene that is a replica of
one found in humans.  Yet playing with the molecular foundations
of the food supply has seemed to many people like the agricultural
equivalent of cloning a lamb--it crosses some unacceptable boundary.
It is one thing to mix different varieties of potato or cassava,
but researchers have now advanced genetics to a point where they
have implanted specific genes from a fish that can swim comfortably
in the icy Atlantic into the cells of others that cannot, and
even, in experiments, into a strawberry, in order to help it ward
off a frost.  For some people, that's taking science a step too
far.

     Even many of those who believe in biotechnology are plainly
afraid of it, especially in Europe, which has always been more
skeptical about genetic research than America.  To critics, the
technology seemed to embody the worst excesses of American industry--fancy
gadgets that solve no problems.  Worse than seeming gimmicky, however,
the technology was usually invisible.  "If Monsanto had spent
a lot of money and produced an egg with no cholesterol, I just
don't think we would be having these problems today,'' Michael
Lipton, an economist at the Poverty Research Unit of the University
of Sussex, told me.  Lipton is an expert on nutrition, farming,
and demographics in the Third World, and believes that genetically
modified products will help feed the world.  "I always say
that electricity is a fantastic invention,'' he continued, "but
if the first two products had been the electric chair and the
cattle prod, I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point."

     The fear and the hope surrounding biotechnology are very much
on display in Basel, a tidy, conservative city dominated by the
pharmaceutical company Novartis.  Not long ago, I had lunch in
a company dining room there.  A card was placed at every plate.
On one side there was a color picture of an ear of rich, golden
corn.  On the back was a photograph of an ear of corn whose kernels
were mossy and white.  This corn was infected with a particularly
hideous mycotoxin fungus, a disease that genetically modified
corn is engineered to prevent.  "This maize-product you are
eating today is specially cooked for you and contains Bt corn
from Germany,'' the card said, referring to corn that had been
genetically modified with a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensus,
and continued, "We should talk more about the real benefits
of Bt corn than of potential negative effects for tomorrow."

     The corn tasted fine, and shortly after lunch I met with the
Novartis chairman and C.E.O., Daniel Vasella, a physician who
is one of agricultural biotechnology's most eloquent supporters
and one of Switzerland's most well-known corporate leaders.  Vasella
is an open man with an ever-present smile, but, when I asked him
why he had decided to stop using genetically modified ingredients
in Gerber baby food, he seemed tense.  "We are not missionaries,''
Vasella said.  "We sell things.  No company can prosper by
telling customers what is good for them.'' He went on, "This
is not just about plants.  It's about our myths, our history and
culture.  It's about what we put in our mouths and in our babies'
mouths.  When you go to somebody's house, they offer you food.
That is a ritual of every life.  What is more basic--and what could
be more frightening--than playing with that?  Of course, it scares
people.  How could something this important not scare people?"

3.

     Monsanto's success in altering the food supply had played into
this fear and reinforced an image that Shapiro has worked tirelessly
to shed, especially in Europe, where the company is seen as a
symbol of corporate imperialism.  Supporters of genetically modified
agriculture like to stress the technology's potential to address
hunger and disease, but Europeans are not hungry.  What they initially
got were herbicides they didn't want and long-lasting tomatoes
they didn't need.  Nor did it help that in 1998 Monsanto had tried
to introduce its products to a continent still recovering from
the shock of mad-cow disease, when signs of opposition to novel
foods, and to science itself, were everywhere.

     To its opponents, Monsanto has become a cauldron of evil--a
place where people have manipulated nature to create grotesque
"frankenfoods," which they have shoved down millions
of unsuspecting throats.  "This whole world view, that genetically
modified food is there so we have no choice but to use it, is
absolutely terrifying,'' Lord Melchett told me.  "And it is
wrong.  There is a fundamental question here: Is progress really
just about marching forward?  We say no.  We say it is time to stop
assuming that discoveries only move us forward.  The war against
nature has to end.  And we are going to stop it."

     Genetically modified plants have been around since the early
eighties.  There was opposition from the start, but the movement
was never particularly strong until, on March 3, 1998, a patent
was issued jointly to the United States Department of Agriculture
and to the Delta & Pine Land Company, of Scott, Mississippi,
America's biggest cottonseed producer.  The patent's title--"Control
of plant gene expression"--was too bland to draw much attention,
but Monsanto noticed.  So did the Rural Advancement Foundation
International, an environmental organization, based in Canada,
that monitors the loss of genetic diversity.  The patent presented
the best evidence yet that agricultural biotechnology could harness
and reroute the basic elements of life.  It also presented the
dangers of doing so, and crystallized, as nothing had before,
the deep emotions associated with this powerful new tool.

     The patent refers to a set of molecular "switches"
that can turn genes essential for reproduction on and off.  The
final step is particularly ingenious: a plant is forced to make
a toxic protein that will sterilize its seeds after it is fully
grown.  In a brilliant stroke of public relations, the Rural Advancement
Foundation International called the new gene the Terminator, after
the robotic killer played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and sterile-seed
technology quickly became a potent symbol for how genetically
modified crops could cause a break in nature.  Worse than that,
such seeds could threaten more than a billion poor people throughout
the developing world, for whom saving harvested seeds is essential.

     Commercial farmers in America and Europe, by contrast, rely
on hybrid seeds, whose vigor diminishes in every generation; to
get the best possible crop, farmers must buy new seeds every year.
For companies like Monsanto, the benefits seemed obvious.  The
ability to shut off a seed at the end of the year restricts its
use, and permits a company to protect it as intellectual property.
Just as those cumbersome registration codes on computer software
are intended to make it impossible for friends to swap copies
of Microsoft Word or Lotus Notes, this would mean that a buyer
could use the altered seed only once.  

     In addition, the technology has the potential to address a
worrisome environmental issue: since such seeds can end a plant's
life cycle, they may insure that unwanted traits do not cross-pollinate
and spread to other species.  The technology would also permit
a producer to load a variety of characteristics into a seed; corn,
for example, could have switches to fight drought or repel frost
or kill a pest, like the often devastating European corn borer
that appears every few seasons.  Depending on the crop, the season,
and the location of the fields, the technology could offer protection
from the sun, or help the seed absorb its rays.  A farmer could
decide how much he wanted to pay for such a seed in the same way
that an air traveller chooses a ticket.  In theory, you would get
what you paid for.  

     Deploying genes in this way would essentially turn something
physical into something intellectual, and that, Shapiro argues,
is what the world today is all about.  "The historical model,
the industrial-revolution model we live by now, says that our
quality of life has to do with possession of things, of stuff,''
he told me one day as we talked in his office.  "But it turns
out that information doesn't occupy a lot of stuff and can create
enormous value.'' As he spoke, he waved his arms so energetically
that he knocked the glasses from his face.  "Biotech is a
subset of information technology.  It's a way of encoding information
in nucleic acids as opposed to encoding it in charged silicon.
It's a way to create value without creating more stuff.  I put
a gene, which is information, into a cottonseed, and I don't have
to spray stuff on the crop in order to control insects.  That strategy
strikes me as the right one for agriculture, just as it strikes
me as the right one for post-industrial society."

     In May of 1998, Monsanto offered $1.9 billion for Delta and
its vast cottonseed business.  The strategy made perfect sense
for a company aggressively pursuing every aspect of agricultural
biotechnology, and every way to protect its inventions.  But the
Terminator seed also turned Monsanto, and its chairman, into even
bigger targets.

4.

      People at Monsanto have never seemed to understand why the
company has been damaged so badly in the public-relations war
over biotechnology when other companies, such as Novartis and
DuPont, have largely escaped the punishment.  (They might have
asked Greenpeace.  "Of all the companies in this business,''
Lord Melchett told me, "Monsanto is the most committed to
agricultural biotechnology.  They are no worse than DuPont.  But
DuPont can survive without genetically modified organisms, and
I don't think Monsanto can.  So we have had an opportunity with
them that we did not have with anyone else.") The skittishness
was evident throughout the company headquarters, in a sprawling
complex in suburban St.  Louis.  Giant tunnels and perfectly trimmed
paths connect the buildings; the place has a grim feeling, like
a hospital.  Although people were helpful and frank, you could
see apprehension in their eyes.  When I tried to bring a camera
on a tour of an experimental greenhouse, permission was refused;
when I met with an allergy researcher to talk about his work in
genetics, he immediately mentioned poor morale, public rancor,
and layoffs.  

     Shapiro was not in town.  Although Monsanto headquarters are
in St.  Louis, he lives in Chicago, with his second wife and their
two children, who are two and four.  Shapiro's advisers had told
him to stay out of the public eye, and he was difficult to reach,
until one day an E-mail popped onto my computer screen telling
me that, "in view of the confusion" that had characterized
my attempts to see him, Shapiro wanted to make sure I knew how
to find him.  From that day, Shapiro--who has a reputation for
being remote--became the most accessible person at Monsanto.  He
always replied to mail on the day it was sent, often within minutes.
"As you can probably tell,'' he wrote in one message to me,
"I'm less busy than the media accounts might have you believe.''

     Shapiro is one of America's best-paid executives.  He earned
nearly twenty million dollars in 1998, and more the year before.
The three words I most often heard from employees and friends
to describe him were "cold," "brilliant,"
and "intimidating."  He can be all those things.  Still,
it would be hard to find a more unlikely symbol of American agriculture--or
of corporate power.  A thin, almost painfully contemplative Jew
from the Upper West Side of Manhattan,Shapiro dresses in oversized
designer sweaters and baggy, rumpled pants; he wears a tie about
five times a year and appears to regret it each time.  He seems
almost uncomfortable with his power and influence.

     Shapiro attended the Hunter School and Horace Mann and then
joined the second class of students admitted directly to Harvard
College as sophomores, in 1956.  "That was a mistake,'' he
told me.  "There were twelve of us.  And I was immediately
intellectually over my head, which is something that I couldn't
quite admit to myself or to anyone else.  I was used to being in
places where I could be a star, and Harvard is the big leagues
and I didn't feel like a star.'' Shapiro taught himself to play
guitar and found refuge in music.  "I was doing folk stuff
back in the days when it was pretty cool to do,'' he said, smiling
at the memory.  "I was literally sitting in caf_s and doing
small shows all around New England."  (Shapiro has two older
children, from his first marriage, who took the music gene one
step farther and started Veruca Salt, which, until it disbanded
two years ago, was one of the Midwest's most successful alternative-rock
bands.)

     Shapiro displayed the type of political leanings one would
expect from a child of West End Avenue.  He protested the war in
Vietnam and--like "the rest of my generation"--was not
fond of chemical companies or of giant companies in general.  I
wondered what had brought an antiwar activist, who seems even
now to have more in common with Joni Mitchell than with John Mitchell,
to the leadership of a multinational corporation.  "You mean
when did I fall?"  he asked, laughing.

     After Harvard, Shapiro attended Columbia University Law School
and stayed on to teach there.  He became interested in urban problems
and held jobs in the Johnson Administration, including one as
a special assistant to the Under-Secretary of Transportation.
He watched, first hand, as the Great Society failed to deliver
on its promise, and he began to sense that government was not
going to cure the world's ills.  He returned to teaching for a
while, at Northeastern, and then at the University of Wisconsin,
before spending several years as general counsel at the General
Instrument Corporation, which his father ran.  In 1979, he moved
to the pharmaceutical company G.  D.  Searle, as its general counsel.
Shapiro, who loves games--he was for years obsessed with the Japanese
board game Go--at first saw corporate life as a giant puzzle.
"It was the best game I'd ever seen,'' he told me.  "It
was the most complicated game.  It had so many moving parts and
so many different kinds of skills you had to have in order to
make it work.  It took me a while to realize that this is not a
game.  This is one of the realest things you get to do in life."

     He learned that in 1982, when he became the head of the NutraSweet
operation at Searle.  "One of the moments in my evolution
that I will always remember is after we had launched the product,
and I was feeling really good because it seemed to be succeeding,''
he said.  "It was the first business I'd ever been given a
chance to try to create, and it was working well.  So I was feeling
proud of myself.  But then I began getting letters from kids and
from parents of kids, mostly diabetics, who had never before been
able to have something like Kool-Aid or Jell-O.  And I realized
what was going on.  We were doing something important for people.
It wasn't just making a handheld calculator, as we had done in
my previous incarnation.  This thing actually mattered.  

     "That did it for me,'' he continued.  "I mean, look,
I am very well compensated, and I like that.  It's nice to have
some of the perks that make life easier.  It is even nice when
you talk with people that they probably laugh at your jokes more
than you deserve because of who you are.  But the thing I never
would have guessed about this job is that it gives you a chance
to make a difference in the world.  When you go home at night and
you talk to your family about what you're working on, it isn't
like `Gee, I designed a really cool paper clip today.' It's about
the earth, it's about the environment, it's about food.  It's about
health and nutrition.  Those are deep, ancient things for civilization,
and they are for the people."

     At that point, Shapiro stopped talking, because he was fighting
back tears.  It was our first meeting, and I wondered if this reserved
and powerful corporate leader was acting.  After a few moments,
he apologized.  "You asked me before how this makes me feel,''
he said, referring to the very personal opposition that he and
Monsanto face almost every day.  "There are two things that
most of us feel.  We feel hurt, and we feel angry.'' Later, he
added to that: "We were really proud to get out front the
way we did''--with biotechnology.  "In retrospect, it seems
incredibly na·ve, but it's the truth.  We had real leadership;
we had worked hard to do it.  We had shown faith in this science
when others were dubious, and it all seemed to be working.  So
we painted a big bull's-eye on our chest, and we went over the
top of the hill."

5.

     In 1997, not long after Roundup Ready canola began to be planted
widely, a farmer in Canada reported that some seeds had "escaped"
and cross-pollinated with a related species of weeds which was
growing on the edge of his fields.  DNA testing proved him right,
and genetically modified agriculture had produced its own public
aberration: a hybrid "superweed" that included the genes
engineered specifically to make a plant resistant to herbicides.
If resistant crops managed to cross with nearby weeds, then herbicides--like
Roundup--would become useless.

     This kind of pollution did not start with modified seeds, and
it is not likely to become a threat in the developed world, because
most major crops have few relatives nearby.  Yet the possibility
that modified genes can "escape" and cross with neighbors
in the fields has led to much discussion about the risks of moving
DNA between species.  The basic genetic structures of most species,
even of species as apparently remote from each other as humans
and, say, lettuce, have far more similarities than differences.
Yet, when you move DNA from one species to another, there is always
a possibility that the new combination will act unpredictably.

     "I'm not going to tell you that an alien wave of superweeds
will take over the planet,'' Rebecca J.  Goldburg, a senior scientist
at the activist organization Environmental Defense, told me.  "I'm
not going to tell you we can't address the problem.  But we don't
really know what the problem is.  And we are moving ahead so rapidly
in thousands of ways with so many genes and so many products.
And I do worry how you can accurately balance the risks, because
we don't have the right information."

     With the tremendous rush to market genetically modified seeds--nearly
two billion dollars' worth were sold last year--many biologists
worry that there still isn't enough known about transgenic crops.
Many varieties of corn, tomatoes, soybean, and squash have been
approved for unlimited use, and by some estimates there are now
thought to be thirty thousand products made from modified crops.
Anyone who has dipped sushi in soy sauce, eaten bread, pasta,
ice cream, candy, or processed meats (not to mention cornflakes)
has almost certainly consumed genetically modified food.  And the
speed with which the products have entered our lives concerns
many people.  "So confident are the technicians of the safety
of their products that each one is seen as no more than an arbitrary
mix of independent lengths of DNA," the popular British geneticist
Steve Jones writes.  "Their view takes no account of the notion
of species as interacting groups of genes, the properties of one...depending
upon the others with which it is placed."  Virus-resistant
crops, for example, contain viral genes in all their cells.  But
viruses can introduce genetic material to their host cells, which
means that these crops may, in theory, be able to create new diseases
rather than defend against them.

     Jones and other scientists argue that the genetic engineering
of seeds ignores a basic fact of evolution: the action of a gene--or
any protein--can depend on the species in which it is located.
The most vivid example of that involved research by the seed company
Pioneer Hi-Bred, where, in 1995, scientists placed genes from
a Brazil nut into a soybean, to help increase levels of the amino
acids methionine and cysteine, which made the beans more nutritious
for animal feed.  The plan worked, but there was an unforeseen
demonstration of what can happen in the food chain when just a
few molecules of DNA are altered: many people are allergic to
Brazil nuts.  If one of these people were to eat a cake made with
soy that contained the Brazil-nut protein, the results could be
deadly.  In this case, science succeeded.  

     The Brazil-nut soybean was never eaten.  Pioneer took blood
from nine people in a laboratory, and stopped the experiments
when the serum tested positive.  Still, with such research occurring
in countries that have weak regulatory systems, similar mistakes
could have powerful consequences.

     Shapiro understands the concern.  "When you start talking
about large-scale introduction of dramatic traits in combination
with each other, you are dealing with systems that are so complicated
that no one can effectively model them," he said.  "You
can start with running field trials, just as when you introduce
a new drug you run clinical trials to see if people really keel
over.  But, just as the human body is a subtle and complicated
thing, it may be that only one time in a million some side effect
happens.  And your testing won't reveal that.  It has to be out
there first.  So what you have to keep asking yourself is: `Suppose
the worst happens, what are the consequences?' "

     Many in the environmental movement have demanded that the "precautionary
principle" be applied with special vigor to genetically modified
foods, arguing that potential risks, no matter how remote, must
be given more weight than any possible benefit, no matter how
great.  "It's the only safe way,'' Lord Melchett told me recently
at the Greenpeace headquarters, in North London.  "Because
with all this stuff you are just dealing in speculation upon speculation.
Hope upon whim.  They talk about these great discoveries.  But what
do we really have?"  The precautionary principle, when interpreted
this way, would make it difficult to answer such a question, because
it would prohibit investigation unless the outcome was known in
advance.

     But the most striking recent example of the precautionary principle
involves the case of John E.  Losey, an assistant professor of
entomology at Cornell University, and his research on the monarch
butterfly.  Last year, the British science journal Nature
published a short letter by Losey and two of his colleagues about
the effects that Bt in a genetically modified type of corn had
on the larvae of monarch butterflies.  Bt is found commonly in
soil, and it produces a toxin that can destroy the digestive tracts
of worms and other pests but is harmless to mammals.  Organic farmers
use Bt spray liberally.  Rachel Carson wrote supportively about
it in "Silent Spring," and Lord Melchett told me that
he has used it on his farm (he has also used Monsanto's Roundup).
Bt spray, however, is chemically fragile and easily broken down
by sunlight or washed away in the rain.  So scientists decided
to put it directly into plants; that way, plants create their
own insecticides.

     Losey examined how monarchs responded, in a laboratory, to
Bt corn pollen, and in his study asserted that three-day-old monarch
larvae that had been reared in a laboratory on milkweed leaves
dusted with Bt pollen had a mortality rate of forty-four per cent.
Nature rejected an article on Losey's study, but agreed
to print a short "scientific correspondence" about his
work.  It was an instant sensation.  The study was seized upon as
"proof'' that genetically modified organisms are deadly;
one newspaper wrote, for example, about "butterflies bearing
grenades.'' "It's the smoking gun," said Peter Roderick,
who on behalf of the Friends of the Earth brought some of the
first lawsuits in England against genetic modification.  "What
more needs to be said?"  But a laboratory is not an open meadow,
which is where monarchs like to lay their eggs, and several studies
have shown that the pollen diminishes rapidly within three metres
of the cornfield's edge, and that corn pollination is usually
complete before monarchs begin feeding.

     "How many monarchs get killed on the windshield of a car?''
asked Anthony M.  Shelton, who is a professor of entomology at
Cornell, and a colleague of Losey's.  Shelton has long urged that
farmers build a "natural" refuge, a sort of moat containing
traditional crops, or crops without Bt genes, around a genetically
modified field.  That would insure genetic diversity: insects that
become resistant to the insecticide for modified crops would mate
with neighbors living on traditional plants nearby, and their
offspring would then be susceptible to the insecticides.

     The monarch study has made for some touchy personal relationships--what
one administrator described to me as "Bt football"--at
Cornell.  Losey, a shy but self-possessed man in his mid-thirties,
has been put in an awkward position; bickering with tenured members
of one's department has never been a fast track to success.  But
he isn't in retreat, either.  "I think it is easy to sit back
and say we would have known this,'' he told me.  "But the
study was not done before, and now we need to look at what it
means.  I take no side.  I am supposed to look coldly and objectively
at any pest-management tactic and assess its risks and benefits.
When we did this paper, there was one other lab working on this
issue.  Now there are a dozen.  That's the way it should be.''

     Because science and politics have become so entangled, it has
been hard to pick rationally through the facts.  The monarch-butterfly
letter--or "killer corn" study, as it was often called--was
released in the middle of the lengthy storm over the Terminator
gene.  The two were often lumped together.  With the Terminator,
Monsanto finally decided it couldn't win.  In June, a few months
before the Greenpeace conference, Gordon Conway, who is an agricultural
ecologist and the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, publicly
urged Monsanto to abandon the gene.  Conway is a committed advocate
of agricultural biotechnology, but he had decided that the gene
carried with it too much dangerous social baggage.  So even though
Monsanto did not yet own the company that holds the patent (and
never would:at the end of 1999, Monsanto withdrew its proposal
to purchase the Delta & Pine Land Company, after an antitrust
inquiry by the Justice Department), and even though the technology
does not yet exist, and nobody can say for sure whether it would
even work, or when, Shapiro announced that Monsanto would not
pursue, develop, or ever use the Terminator.  It was among the
first times in the history of science that such a prominent discovery
was disavowed years before it was even clear what its value might
be.

6.

     Late last fall, I asked Lord Melchett if he thought that Monsanto
had hit bottom.  "No, it hasn't, actually,'' he said, confidently.
"Not by a long shot."

     As the Dow rose in the last two years, Monsanto's stock fell
from a high of sixty-three dollars to thirty-five dollars at the
end of December.  (Last week, it had recovered, to fifty.)Just
before Christmas, Monsanto even became something of an international
joke, when the company's caterer in London announced with great
fanfare that, for the safety of the employees, it had banned genetically
modified food from the cafeteria at Monsanto's U.K.  headquarters.

     Shapiro's vision of a unified "life sciences" company
that relied on biotechnology to create foods and drugs began to
fade.  Consolidation has become routine in both the agriculture
and the pharmaceutical industries, and after more than a year
of speculation that the company would break into pieces--and after
many merger discussions with competitors--Monsanto announced,
on December 19th, that it would join with Pharmacia & Upjohn.
By the end of 1999, the company was worth less than twenty-five
billion dollars--not much more than what most analysts say its
pharmaceutical division, Searle, which Monsanto bought in 1985,
would be worth by itself.  (In 1998, Monsanto almost completed
a merger with American Home Products, a deal that would have valued
it at more than thirty-four billion dollars.) At the same time,
Monsanto's Celebrex, a painkiller for arthritis that may also
play a role in cancer prevention, had just become the most profitable
new drug in American history, earning more than a billion dollars
in its first year on the market, and Monsanto herbicides were
selling better than ever.  

     One of the many organizations that oppose Monsanto (the Internet
is filled with web sites like "MonsantoSucks" and references
to "MonSatan") quickly described the merger with Pharmacia
as Pharmageddon for Monsanto.  "The reason there is controversy
about this has nothing to do with biotechnology,'' Shapiro told
me last fall.  "This is about power.  It's about them saying
that if you want to make changes in people's lives or introduce
new technology, you...are going to have to go through us.  And
if we don't approve, we are going to bring you down."

7.

     If you drive out of Naples for more than ten miles, on any
road and in any direction, you will roll past fields of fennel,
apricots, lettuce, onions, artichokes, cabbage, olive trees, and
tomatoes.  Especially tomatoes.  This region is home to several
of the world's most prized varieties, and among them one stands
out: the plum-shaped San Marzano.  According to Neapolitan tradition,
pizza was invented as a vehicle for the consumption of the San
Marzano.  Ash from the eruption of Mt.  Vesuvius created a soil
rich in potassium and other minerals which is not found anywhere
else on earth.  Like wine from Bordeaux or the tobacco in Cuban
cigars, tomatoes grown there have a special taste.

     Eduardo Angelo Ruggiero's family has grown tomatoes outside
Naples since 1919.  Ruggiero is a sweet-tempered forty-two-year-old
man with short, dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses.  He has three
children who plan to grow tomatoes, too.  They will have to do
it somewhere else, though, because Ruggiero's farm no longer operates
here.  "The last ten years have been disastrous,'' he told
me one day when I went to tour the barren fields with him.  "In
the eighties, this was the No.  1 tomato-producing region in Italy.
Now it is No.  4 or 5."

     That's because a mosaic virus--a simple, common, but devastating
disease--has taken over the fields.  The infected plants become
tall, stringy, and thin, making it hard for them to soak up water
and impossible to protect the fruit from sun.  "The tomato
was born here,'' Ruggiero told me.  "Now I think it's dying
here.  We understand that genetics could help, but the question
is political.  I myself have mixed feelings.  I am afraid that if
we grow tomatoes differently they will taste like every other
tomato in the world.  But there is also a truth.  We have lost ninety
per cent of our production in the past decade."

     Ruggiero and others in the region sought from the government
funding for genetically altered seeds, and researchers say it
should be easy to create a plant that could withstand the virus.
In Italy, however, as in most of Europe, there are regulations
against such intervention.  "TV every day is telling us the
products are dangerous,'' he said, "and are being dumped
on Europe against our will."

     Not every country has had this experience.  In Kenya, the national
Agricultural Research Institute, with considerable help from Monsanto,
has created a sweet potato that is protected against similar viral
attacks.  Sweet potatoes are an important food in Africa: they
contain more calories and a greater array of micronutrients than
any other crop.  By inserting in the sweet potato viral proteins
from the outer coat of the sweet-potato feathery-mottle virus,
the researchers appear to have conferred immunity from a number
of other common viruses as well.  In Mexico, a similar approach
has been used.  In this case, Monsanto donated the genes to the
Mexicans, but only after they agreed to insert them solely in
varieties of potato used in Mexico.  

     In Italy, however, seed companies must present a certificate
to farmers' co-operatives stating that their products have not
been genetically modified.  At harvest time, farmers are required
to do that, too.  Then food processors, distributors, and, eventually,
supermarket chains all have to provide signed affidavits showing
that their products are, as the Italians say, "biological,''
because, Ruggiero told me, people there refuse to tinker with
nature.

     But tinkering with nature is what farmers do, and so in thinking
about genetically modified crops one runs into a crucial question:
Is a plant perfectly natural if its genes are formed in a combination
that has been arrived at over generations of breeding but polluted
and dangerous if those same genes--the identical little snippets
of DNA--are shot into the plant walls with a tungsten-coated gene
gun?  "This just drives me insane,'' Susan McCouch, a rice
specialist who also teaches at Cornell, told me.  "If you
look even briefly at the history of plant breeding, then you know
that every crop we eat today is genetically modified.  Every one.
Human beings have imposed selection on them all.  So don't ask
me what is natural and what is not.  Because I have no idea."

8.

     If genetically modified crops are to fulfill their promise,
they will have to do it in the Third World.  Developments that
Europeans dismiss as a joke matter deeply there.  (The delayed-ripening
tomato, initially marketed by Calgene, a company now owned by
Monsanto, is a perfect example.  To take genes that control ripening
in fruit and slow them down may mean little in countries where
produce is plentiful, refrigeration is cheap, and the roads are
always open, but in Africa and Asia up to forty per cent of all
vegetables rot in the field or are lost to pests.) Still, none
of these advances are likely without large increases of public
funding for farmers.  "There is not enough incentive,"
Gordon Conway, of the Rockefeller Foundation, told me.  He has
been singularly effective in arguing that biotechnology must play
a critical role in raising the level of prosperity in the developing
world.  "You have these two giants locked in a horrible battle,''
he said.  "The fight may hurt Monsanto, and it may hurt Greenpeace.
But the real casualties are going to be truth and the poor."

     The need for new solutions to feeding the world is almost the
only issue on which both sides seem to agree.  New methods of farming,
particularly the use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, helped
to more than double world food production over the past forty
years.  The number of hungry people fell drastically, despite a
huge population increase.  But this success came at the cost of
tremendous erosion and loss of arable land.  In addition, rapid
urbanization has put new pressures on water resources; since the
eighties, there has been a decline in the growth of crops-per-acre
in most of Asia and Africa.  Yet, according to a projection released
last October by the International Food Policy Research Institute,
the world demand for rice, wheat, and maize will increase forty
per cent by the year 2020.

     If the politics of genetically modified food has never been
so anguished, the scientific prospects have never seemed more
promising.  Charles Arntzen and colleagues at Cornell's Boyce Thompson
Institute for Plant Research, for example, are tantalizingly close
to developing a vaccine for hepatitis B and one for diarrhea that
could be incorporated into the cells of a banana.  The benefits
would be enormous, particularly in places where refrigerators,
sterile needles, and hygiene are always in short supply.  Bananas
can be grown in the countries that need them.  They are cheap,
simple to distribute, and babies can eat them as easily as adults.
Arntzen told me that it will soon be possible to grow enough bananas
on a single four-acre plot to protect a mid-size African country--his
example was Uganda--from hepatitis B.

     The most important recent development involves the world's
most important crop: rice.  At least a third of the world's population
depends on rice, but it is a poor source of vitamins.  According
to unicef, more than a hundred million children suffer from Vitamin
A deficiency; millions lose their eyesight as a result, and at
least two million die each year from related infections.  But in
January a team led by Ingo Potrykus, of the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology, in Zurich, and Peter Beyer, of the University of
Freiburg, in Germany, published a report showing how they had
introduced into the rice plant three genes that complete the genetic
pathway needed to produce beta-carotene--which is then broken
down into Vitamin A.  The result has been called Golden Rice, because
of its color (beta-carotene turns the rice yellow), and also because
of what it can accomplish.  "When you can eat Vitamin A in
your rice,'' Arntzen told me, "this one accomplishment of
genetic engineering could alleviate more suffering and illness
than any single medicine has done in the history of the world."

     The gap between scientists and humanists has narrowed in the
last fifty years, but it would be foolish to pretend that it has
disappeared entirely.  When I told Lord Melchett that I wanted,
really, to write about the science of genetic modification, he
was appalled.  "If you write something, it shouldn't be about
the science,'' he told me.  "You'd be missing the point.  People
do things for all sorts of reasons that are rational, but they
are not scientific or technical.  Why does somebody buy a Rolls-Royce
or a Mercedes?  It's a box with four wheels.  But nobody says you
are completely irrational to buy an expensive car.  If it's acceptable
to choose your car based on emotion and not science, why should
it be wrong to choose your food that way?"

     I didn't ask him if he really thought it was acceptable to
buy a Rolls.  But I understood his fear.  When frozen food was introduced,
in the nineteen-twenties, people who were concerned about the
effects of keeping food in a freezer for weeks or longer tried
to ban it.  Genetically modified products are new enough so that
similar fears are easy to understand.  The comparison that Greenpeace
and many other opponents like to make is to nuclear power--a technology
that seems to be in eclipse, despite having fundamentally changed
the world.  When it comes to promise, and potential peril, the
pharmaceutical industry itself provides a better analogy: the
development of antibiotics and vaccines has helped double life
expectancy in most countries in the last century.  Penicillin alone
has saved millions of lives.  But every technology has risks and
benefits, and the same is true for food and drugs.  People die
from eating peanuts and shellfish every day.  Allergies to penicillin
still kill a few people every year in the United States, and aspirin
causes a wide range of serious illnesses, and even many deaths.

     Politics, not science, is now guiding the discussion about
genetically modified products, and that makes people like Gordon
Conway impatient.  When we discussed the zealous way the precautionary
principle is currently being applied, for example, he said, "There
could be no benefits for anybody, because it could never be proved
in advance that there would be no risk.  I can think of no better
definition for the word `Luddite.'"

9.

     On an overcast day at the end of March, Monsanto stockholders
gathered in Skokie, Illinois, to vote on the merger with Pharmacia.
Shapiro told me before the meeting that he didn't know what to
expect: protests were possible and security was tight.  Yet there
wasn't one placard in sight, and only about a hundred and fifty
people turned up for the meeting, which was held at the North
Shore Center for the Performing Arts, a high-tech concert venue
surrounded by a string of malls.  Most of those present were retirees
from Searle, which is just down the road.

     Shapiro appeared on the stage in casual slacks, a blue cotton
shirt, and no tie.  The Monsanto motto, "Food, Health, Hope,"
was projected on a screen behind him.  He whipped through the proceedings
in nine minutes.  He talked about "convertible perpetual preferred
stock,'' and requirements to change the company name to the Pharmacia
Corporation.  The vote that ended the era of Monsanto as an independent
company was approved, as one shareholder noted, "in less
time than it's going to take me to find my car keys."  Shapiro
thanked everyone and pointed out that "this is a momentous
day in the history of our company."  

     Afterward, I asked Shapiro if he felt at all wistful.  He smiled
bleakly.  "You always feel that way when you change something
special,'' he said.  "It doesn't mean it's bad or wrong.  It's
just new."

     The Monsanto name will now remain attached solely to the agricultural
part of the business, which may eventually be sold, so that the
new company can focus on pharmaceuticals.  Shapiro will relinquish
the title of chief executive in the new Pharmacia Corporation,
staying on for the next eighteen months as non-executive chairman,
a job in which he will work mostly to smooth the merger with the
board.  When that chore is finished, Shapiro's career at Monsanto
will be over.  

     "You know, Bob Shapiro is probably the greatest visionary
we have in American agriculture,'' Charles Arntzen told me.  "But
it's never easy being that far ahead of the pack.  I've spent a
lot of time in Texas in my life, and they have this expression
there for a guy who is out on a limb; they say he's a ridge rider.
And Bob Shapiro has been riding that ridge for a really long time.
Sometimes those people get where they are going, but usually not.
Usually, they get picked off."

10.

     After one of our final conversations, I realized that, for
all I knew, Bob Shapiro, a native of the Upper West Side and a
specialist in urban life, wouldn't know which end of a shovel
to plant in the earth.  I assumed that to him this great game with
seeds and chemicals was just that--a fantastic abstraction, like
Go.  So I sent him a note, asking if, as the head of one of America's
biggest seed companies, he had ever planted a garden.  It was a
late winter Sunday, but he replied at once.  

     "Oddly enough, as I signed on to get my E-mail today I
was (and am) surrounded by catalogs from White Flower Farm, Wayside
Gardens, Shepherd's Seeds and Johnny's Selected Seeds," he
said.  "As soon as I finish my E-mail, I'm going on the web
to place my spring orders.  My father was an avid gardener, and
so am I.  We have a place in Michigan where I grow mostly flowering
perennials, but also vegetables, fruit and berries.  I love growing
stuff, I love making compost--it all seems miraculous to me.  It's
also a rich source of metaphors for everything important in life."