The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

the invention of gmos 139obsessed by only one thing: finding the gene that would immunize plantcells against Roundup. This was especially urgent because Calgene, a Californiastart-up, had just announced in a letter published in Nature that ithad succeeded in making tobacco resistant to glyphosate. 11 Discussionswere already under way on an agreement with the French company Rhône-Poulenc to develop crops resistant to glyphosate. At the same time, the Germancompany Hoechst was going all out to find the gene resistant to itsherbicide Basta, not to mention DuPont (Glean) and Ciba-Geigy (atrazine).In short, all the chemical giants were pursuing the same goal, because thestakes were primarily economic: companies were already imagining the patentsthey could file on all the major food crops in the world.In St. Louis, stress took up permanent residence, because the notoriousgene remained elusive. Jaworski’s researchers were going around in circles.They had succeeded in identifying the gene responsible for the enzyme that,as I reported in Chapter Four, is blocked by the action of glyphosate molecules,causing tissue necrosis and plant death. The idea was to manipulateit so as to deactivate the reaction to the herbicide, and then introduce it intoplant cells, but nothing worked. “It was like the Manhattan Project,” saidHarry Klee, a member of the research team. “The antithesis of how a scientistusually works. A scientist does an experiment, evaluates it, makes a conclusionand goes on to the next variable. With Roundup resistance we weretrying twenty variables at the same time: different mutants, different promoters,multiple plant species. We were trying everything at once.” 12The search lasted for more than two years, until the day in 1987 when engineersthought of rummaging through the garbage in Monsanto’s Lulingplant, located 450 miles south of St. Louis. At this site on the banks of theMississippi, Monsanto produced millions of tons of glyphosate annually. Decontaminationpools were supposed to treat production residues, but some ofthe residues had contaminated nearby land and ponds. Samples were takento collect thousands of microorganisms in order to detect the ones that hadnaturally survived glyphosate and identify the gene that gave them that invaluableresistance. It took a further two years for a robot analyzing the molecularstructure of the bacteria collected to finally come up with the rarepearl. It was “a great Eureka moment,” said Stephen Padgette, one of the “inventors”of Roundup Ready soybeans, now a Monsanto vice president. 13But the game was far from over. They now had to find the genetic constructthat would enable the gene to function once it was introduced into