Monsanto's Biotech Makeover Takes Root
It scores with corn and soybeans. Next up: battling drought
Head start. Now Monsanto is promising the ultimate goal in corn management: drought tolerance. Success isn't guaranteed, despite the promising trials at Monsanto's test fields near Jerseyville and elsewhere. Battling drought is more complex than the other traits introduced so far through genetics, such as pest and herbicide resistance. "But either Monsanto is able to make it work, or nobody can make it work," says Vincent Andrews, a stock analyst with Morgan Stanley. "And barring Monsanto making mistakes, we just don't see anyone catching up."
Its perceived lead is partly a reflection of Monsanto's early investment in biotech. The company poured billions during the 1980s and 1990s into research and buying seed companies. It also reflects the methodical nature of the science of crossing plant genes, which despite its reams of data and years of trials, starts with high imprecision.
Early on, in fact, it was a "gene gun"— literally, a 22-caliber slug—blasting genes from one plant into the tissue of another. "It's the brute-force method," says William Kosinski, a Monsanto scientist, while giving a tour of the company's labs. More often now, it is a quieter injection involving bacteria that are expert at carrying genes into foreign tissues, but no more exact as to where and how the target DNA attaches to the host plant. The only way to know how the gene expresses itself in the new plant is to grow it (and scores of variations) to see which might take on the characteristic, such as Roundup tolerance.
"It's a long winnowing process," says Thomas Peters, Monsanto's chief scientist for new corn traits. "There are no skipping steps." Each gene project eventually leads to hundreds of plants being cultivated in growth chambers, which are rooms filled with bright lights and sealed behind stainless steel doors that give them the look of walk-in refrigerators. There are 122 of the growth chambers at a Monsanto lab building in a St. Louis suburb alone—the most at any one location. The plants that graduate move to greenhouses that sit atop the six-story lab building. Steadily winnowed down over several years, as many as 70 in a promising project make it to the first year in a Monsanto test field, where the selection process continues for three to six more years. His corn teams may have 10 or 12 projects underway in any one year, Peters says, and maybe only one every three years leads to a "Eureka moment" of a commercialized plant. Along the way, crops get analyzed, including at a lab with machines that can each process 5,000 ears of corn a day, kernel by kernel. "You never know when you might find the one you're looking for," says Monsanto scientist Steven Modiano.
It's that randomness of the initial process that fuels some criticism. "We don't know enough about plant genomes to know what all the effects will be," says Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety, an environmental group. He and other critics say the new genes can generate new or raised levels of toxins in a plant or introduce proteins that cause allergies—and argue that testing is inadequate. Biotech proponents say governmental regulation is stringent and that people have lived with those genetically altered soybeans for a decade with no food or feed safety issues. "The thing I'm most proud of is the industry's impeccable environmental and safety record," says Fraley, Monsanto's technology chief.
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