The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

monsanto weaves its web, 1995–1999 189“Can we trust the maker of Agent Orange to genetically engineer ourfood?” was the question posed by Business Ethics, “the magazine of corporateresponsibility,” which also interviewed Shapiro at the beginning of1997. 28 Reading what Shapiro was saying at the time, I asked myself preciselythe same question: was he sincere, and did he really believe what hesaid? To make up my mind, I dissected the career of the Harvard graduate,who liked to strum his guitar with Joan Baez in demonstrations against theVietnam War. From that time he had maintained an open distaste for necktiesand an unfailing attachment to the Democrats. After working in theadministration of Jimmy Carter (who became an ardent supporter of biotechnology),Shapiro was hired in 1979 as legal director of the pharmaceuticalcompany Searle, headed by none other than Donald Rumsfeld,secretary of defense for Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977 and for George W.Bush from 2001 to 2006.Searle was at the time in conflict with the FDA, which had decided tosuspend the sale of aspartame, a highly controversial artificial sweetener, becauseit was suspected of causing brain tumors. Curiously, the product, soldunder the name NutraSweet, was reauthorized in 1981, when Rumsfeldjoined the newly elected Reagan administration. In the meantime, Shapiro,who had been in charge of handling the aspartame controversy, had been appointedhead of the NutraSweet division. He negotiated with Coca-Cola theintroduction of the sweetener in the new Diet Coke line of products. Thestory is that he carried off a major victory: he secured agreement thatthe name “NutraSweet”—that is, the Searle brand—would be printed onthe labels with its logo (a little swirl), which prevented competitors that alsomade aspartame from selling it to Coca-Cola.Monsanto bought Searle in 1985, making it the pharmaceutical divisionof the multinational company at the very time that Monsanto was requestingapproval for the sale of bovine growth hormone. Shapiro, who often describedhimself as a “passionate gardener,” became head of Monsanto’sagricultural division in 1990 and in that position was in charge of handlingPosilac, the trade name of bovine growth hormone, or rBGH.I was troubled by this detail in his career, which cast a veil of suspicionover the ecological and Third World–friendly talk that he took up soon afterward,and I tried to contact the former Monsanto CEO. In 2006, he washead of the Belle Center of Chicago, an NGO established in St. Louis in1984 to serve children with disabilities. In a New Yorker article, Michael