The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

158 the world according to monsantobecause it underscores the imperfection (to put it mildly) of the process forapproving food or chemical products as it is conducted around the world.Very seldom do companies provide the raw data of the tests they have conducted;they generally merely prepare a summary that reviewers sometimesonly skim. As Dr. Gurian-Sherman very persuasively puts it: “The morehighly summarized and less detailed those data, the greater the role of thedeveloper in determining the safety of the crop, and conversely the more theFDA must rely on the developer’s judgment.”He also analyzed the quality of the tests conducted by the producers, andhis conclusions are troubling. He found that some fundamental health considerationswere frequently neglected, such as the toxicity or allergenicity ofproteins in the transgenic plants.Finally, he raised a concluding technical point that is of primary importancebecause it undermines the validity of practically all the toxicologicaltests conducted on GMOs, particularly by Monsanto. Generally, to measurethe toxicity and allergic potential of the proteins produced in the plant by theinserted gene, the companies did not use the proteins as they were expressedin the manipulated plant, but those present in the original bacterium, that is,before the gene derived from the bacterium was transferred. Officially, theyproceeded in this way because it was difficult to remove a sufficient quantityof the pure transgenic protein from the plant but much easier to do so fromthe bacterium, which could produce as much protein as was needed.In the view of some scientists, this practice might well represent a manipulationintended to conceal a fact that companies such as Monsanto hadalways made a point of denying: the inserted genes, and hence the proteinsthey produced, were not always identical to the original genes and proteins.Indeed, random insertion caused the appearance of unknown proteins. Dr.Gurian-Sherman concluded: “Therefore, bacterially produced protein maynot be identical to, and have the same health effects as, the GE protein fromthe plant.”The Unshakable Team of Maryanski and TaylorEven as FDA scientists were expressing their disagreement with the policydocument, it was published on May 29, 1992. Two months earlier, onMarch 20, Commissioner David Kessler wrote a very curious memorandum