GREGORY PALAST

Dreaming in Monsanto
Editors who defy government censorship fall flat on their backs when faced with powerful commercial interests

he declassified memo dated 18 November 1997 from Dr Ian Alexander to his staff states: 'Dr Kowalczyk indicated that he had received a copy of the JECFA package for review from Dr Nick Weber.' Kowalczyk is head of regulatory affairs for Monsanto Company, the biogenetics giant. Weber works for the US Food & Drug Administration. Alexander directs Canada's Bureau of Veterinary Drugs. The memo was the first indication that Monsanto had received copies of a confidential critique of the company's hormone, bovine somatotropin (BST), from the secret proceedings of the Joint Economic Committee on Food Additives. JECFA advises the Codex Alimentarius whose decisions, in turn, affect whether, under international trade agreements, the USA could force Europe to accept BST-produced milk products. Weber had special access to the JECFA documents. Monsanto and its allies used their advance knowledge of critics' confidential reports, including the positions of the European Community's Food and Agriculture Directorate, to prepare for the decision-making meeting of JECFA set for February 1998 in Rome. 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 increased Monsanto s annual revenues by an estimated US$500,000 annually in the US market, and an unknown amount in the black market in Europe where BST remains banned pending review by health officials. The company took no chances. According to Alexander's notes of a phone call with Kowalczyk on 27 August, obtained under Canada's
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Access to Information law, the Monsanto operative suggested that Canada place Dr Len Ritter on the JECFA panel. It was done. Ritter would not be alone in making the case for Monsanto. Dr Margaret Miller of the US Food & Drug Administration was assigned to write up the official decision and summary of the closed JECFA debate. Prior to joining government, Miller ran a Monsanto laboratory analysing BST, a fact unknown to the FDA's commissioner during the agency's review for the drug approval. Weber, who passed the document to Monsanto, works at FDA under Miller. Miller's report was much to the company's liking. Nevertheless, Monsanto s Kowalczyk saw storm clouds rising. His 8 June 1998 fax to Weber and industry competitors notes that Dr Michael Hansen, an adviser to the JECFA, 'does not agree with the conclusions of the JECFA summary report'. He certainly did not. Hansen wrote that test data suggested BST could cause breast and prostate cancers in humans. The test was old but, to Hansen, the data was new and disturbing. The test consisted of a 90day study of rats fed BST. Monsanto's report that the rats suffered 'no toxicologically significant changes' became the cornerstone of the US FDA's quick approval of the hormone in 1993. The US agency refused to release the study's data on the grounds it would harm Monsanto's commercial interests. Indeed, it would have. A fourth of the rats showed signs of anti-body reaction to BST. Some had cysts. None of this was known until, after years of requests, Canadian government scientists finally obtained the data. Maybe they wish they hadn't. The six Canadian veterinarian researchers who told their superiors about the politely termed 'gaps' in the Monsanto data found themselves reassigned, demoted and silenced until last year, when Canada's Senate provided parliamentary immunity for their testimony. Monsanto had other worries. US government approval did not translate 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 from declaring that products did not contain the hormone. Prior to joining government, Taylor was a partner in the law firm that represented
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Monsanto. He has now left government to work directly in Monsanto's Washington office. ately, I've been dreaming in Monsanto. Given that I've been investigating the commercialisation of science for the London Observer, it is no surprise such dreams may come. But, when the cows chatter 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 stuff of my beat, corporate America. But there was something especially bothersome about the Monsanto tales. The key was in a minor side story I have not previously reported. On 4 October 1989, three University of Sussex scientists received from Monsanto a floppy disk with data on cows injected with BST. The company's published 30-week study reported no ill effects of the hormone. 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, there was a lot of pus dripping from BST cow udders into the milk buckets. The peer-review panel at Veterinary Record accepted these extraordinary findings for publication. But Monsanto stopped publication, claiming the data was proprietary and secret. The. Journal of Dairy Science prepared to publish it, excluding raw data. Still Monsanto killed the paper's publication, already typeset. Finally, the British Food Journal agreed to print the Sussex study - so long as the professors would indemnify the publisher, a financial impossibility. By now, it was 1995 and, while the refugee paper sought asylum, Monsanto obtained US FDA approval of the drug (1993). The study remains unpublished. It was Monsanto's reasoning for denying the Sussex study review by the scientific community that vexes my cow dreams. Monsanto's Dr Doug Hard wrote: 'As the raw data are confidential all subsequent analyses are as well' For the first time, a corporation had not only claimed control over data of commercial value, but also successfully asserted control over opinions about the data, control over the terms, forum and information open to debate. If Monsanto can bar a scientist from citing company data, or discussing it in learned journals, then no researcher can effectively challenge Monsanto without its approval. Monsanto may be correct: its industry may require recognising

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corporate ownership of thought processes, turning discourse and debate into property that can be fenced, enclosed and guarded. My data-talking dream 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 biogenetic engineering is this massive expansion of censorship required for the new industry to succeed. Monsanto is the perfect McLuhan company. Its true product is information. That the information is imprinted inside a seed or bacterium's DNA, as opposed to newsprint or web page, is not significant. Its profitability resides in its maintaining a lock-down hold on this information, and that must include power over debate and examination of the data. From an informational and legal point of view, genetically modified products depart radically from functionally similar products modified through natural methods. A Monsanto press hack was quick to explain this to me this year when Pioneer Hi-Bred Corporation accused Monsanto of'genetic misappropriation', of extracting DNA codes from Hi-Bred corn seed for use in Monsanto's own seed. Monsanto's action seemed a wee hypocritical in the light of its own well-known campaign of withering lawsuits against farmers who plant seeds descended from Monsanto-bred crops. Not so, explained Monsanto's spokeswoman, 'We have done nothing illegal.' Hi-Bred used the age-old method of creating the new seed: cross-breeding. Farmers have bred seed for millennia, and anyone is free to take from the seeds the information placed there, ultimately, by Nature. Nature's data are free and open to study, debate and analysis by any student of the physical world. Looking at Monsanto as an information enterprise, rather than an industrial one, explains its regulatory lobbying practices as a consistent extension of its science. Its lobby effort was aimed at obtaining an early look at the studies of BST critics, placing former (and future) employees in key regulatory listening posts, blocking labelling of genetically modified foods and burying health-effects data under commercial interest claims. The paradigm is control of the flow of information, data and analysis: who can speak and when; what is revealed and what concealed. On the other side is Hansen, whose confidential report fell into Monsanto'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 that Monsanto saw his commentary but that the company did not make its own reports simultaneously available to him and other researchers. And Hansen objects to JECFA's secrecy rules which bar him from sharing with other scientists and the public the give and take of the technical discussions. Not all of the control is subtle. In 1997, a Florida television station owned by Murdoch's Fox network looked into the BST controversy. Two well-known reporters spent nearly a year developing their short news broadcast. When they refused to accept the seventieth rewrite of the script, they were fired. They have not worked since. X TONaipaul said of imperial powers, 'They don't lie. They elide.' It is V vjthe information hidden from view, the facts removed from debate that can colour black as white, oppression as freedom, infection as health. In much of the world this valuable tool, censorship, remains a government monopoly. To protect their interests from dissent, some governments reserve to themselves ownership of ideas; they are the landlords of discourse. Happily, there are editors who would choose jail rather than change a word of print if the demand comes from a government censor. Yet these same editors will slash news reports, spike television productions or pulp entire journals based on a single note from Monsanto or merely the fear of one. What we see in Monsanto s controlling exposure of information about their products is the new trend toward privatisation of censorship. Privatised censorship is the by-product of biogenetics, as closed debate is the only guarantor of the commercial value of its secrets, irreversibly changing the nature of scientific investigation and discourse.
Gregory Palast is a New York-based expert on industry regulation and investigative reporter. His column, 'Inside Corporate America,' appears fortnightly in the Observer of London

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I was a press censor for Monsanto

n western Europe, the most invidious form of censorship is selfcensorship. Its minor evil is in hoodwinking readers into believing they have shared the author's full story; its greater evil in perpetuating the pleasant myth that we live in societies where free expression and open discourse are untrammelled. So to those of you who read my fortnightly column in the Observer, or have read my stories of lobbying in Britain, it's time I levelled with you: you've never read the full story. I can't remember a report yet that I have not cut, fudged, excised, snipped or noodled at the request of lawyers for the Guardian Media Group. Take the Monsanto story. When I first reported that US officials passed confidential European regulatory documents to the corporation, I agreed to remove a side story about allegations of bribery in Canada. Lawyers convinced me that this report could draw a financially burdensome suit, though we would certainly win in court. I could not see the value of jeopardising my paper over the matter, so I said, 'Cut it.' This is no slur on the Observer nor our sister rag, the Guardian. No other newspaper group would dare print the Monsanto story at all. The terrible thing is, the public is ignorant. They've been cheated of the whole truth like buying a short-weighted loaf of bread. Worse, the London reader, unlike the reader in Pakistan, is falsely reassured that there is no censor snipping out sections of copy. But some journalists under dictatorships have the blessing of leaving a blank space in the paper as a signal of official censorship. So I have suggested the following to my editor-in-chief: that British editions of our paper leave paragraphs empty, marked only, 'Copy removed on advice of counsel fearful of legal action by Monsanto (or BP or whomever)'. As to the Monsanto Information sliced from my Observer report: it was printed the following week - in the Observer. Lawyers, like government censors, have their moods.

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