The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

80 the world according to monsantowhich is crucial for the early phases of carcinogenesis, earned the NobelPrize for Physiology or Medicine for the Britons Tim Hunt and Paul Nurseand the American Leland Hartwell.In the early 2000s, Professor Bellé decided to use it to test the health effectsof pesticides. His concern at the time had been raised by the level ofpollution observed in French waterways as well as food: “The data concerningunderground water in France revealed contamination considered suspectin 35 percent of cases,” says Julie Marc, who consulted all the availablestudies. “Ocean waters also showed widespread and perpetual contaminationby herbicides. . . . The ingestion of fruits and vegetables also contributesto human pesticide levels. The figures in this area are disturbing,since 8.3 percent of the samples of vegetable foods of French origin analyzedcontained pesticide residues above the maximum limits and 49.5 percenthad some residues.” 21In this not very reassuring overview, the Brittany region displayed a recordlevel of contamination, particularly affecting water intended for human consumption,according to Marc: “In 75 percent of cases, the regulatory standardfor the combination of substances was exceeded and more than tenwere sometimes detected in a single sample, with respective concentrationsexceeding the regulatory standard of 0.1 ppb. This pollution originated fromagricultural practices, but also from the use of pesticides in non-cultivatedareas.” She also points to one of the aberrations in the regulatory system: ithad set the acceptable level of residues in water as 0.1 ppb, but this referredto a single herbicide, and said nothing about the cumulative effect of differentpesticides—a very common occurrence—nor of their interaction.In the early 2000s, Bellé proposed to the regional council of Brittany thathe conduct a study to assess the impact of herbicides on cell division. “Theirony of the story,” he told me in his Roscoff laboratory on September 28,2006, “is that we had decided to take Roundup as a control in the experiments,because we were persuaded that the product was completely harmless,as the advertisement of the dog with its bone suggested. And obviously,the huge surprise was that that herbicide produced much more significanteffects than the other products we were testing. That’s why we changed thefocus of our research to concentrate entirely on the effects of Roundup.”“How did you proceed?” I asked.“Concretely, we had sea urchins lay eggs; characteristically they producelarge numbers of ova. We placed those ovocytes in proximity to sperm and