The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

94 the world according to monsantomental medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, had authored manynotable articles and books, particularly on cancer—the upsurge of which,he claimed, was linked to environmental pollution.* In the spring of 1989,he received a phone call from a farmer who had agreed to test rBGH onhis herd.“He got angry when he understood that I had never heard of the transgenichormone,” Epstein told me in his Chicago office on October 4, 2006.“He said to me: ‘You ought to look at it, that’s your job! This hormone is makingmy cows sick, and I’m afraid the people who drink my milk will get sicktoo.’” This led Professor Epstein to comb through the 1987 and 1988 issuesof the Journal of Dairy Science, where he found many “promotional articles”published by American researchers, and Europeans as well, who had testedrBGH for Monsanto.† “All these publications claimed that the hormoneposed no major health problems,” Epstein recalled, “but there were very fewserious data backing up that claim. The tests had been conducted on smallgroups of ten cows, which reduced their statistical validity, and most important,they had been of very short duration. Despite these biases, they revealeda significant increase in mastitis and a decrease in the fertility of thecows treated, as well as major changes in the nutritional quality and thecomposition of the milk.”Epstein then discovered that milk and meat from the American experimentalherds had been placed in the food chain even though the hormonewas not yet officially approved. On July 19, 1989, he wrote a letter to FDAcommissioner Frank Young‡ expressing his concerns, which he revealeda short time later in an article published in the Los Angeles Times. 1 On August11, 1989, the agency published a reply, signed by Gerald B. Guest, directorof the CVM and Burroughs’s boss: “The pivotal human food safetyinformation led us to make the determination that food derived from BSTtreatedcows is safe,” it said in typical bureaucratic prose. “Our scientists at*In 1994, Professor Epstein established the Coalition for the Prevention of Cancer. He received theRight Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel Prize”) in 1998, in 2000 the Project CensoredAward, and in 2005 the Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medal for his “international contributionsto cancer prevention.”†The hormone was tested in France at the Institut Technique de l’Élevage Bovin (located in LeRheu, near Rennes) as well as at breeding centers of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique.(Le Monde, December 30, 1988, and August 30, 1990).‡Frank Young held the post from August 1984 to December 1989. He was replaced by David Kessler(1990–97), who put in place the nonregulation of GMOs.