Jonathan Buchanan
Monsanto is responsible for a great chunk of the Washington University infrastructure: they helped fund the Monsanto Laboratory of Life Sciences; they sponsor the Department of Chemical Engineering and a number of fellowships, practicum projects, and scholars programs; and they donate $5 million every year toward research in the School of Medicine.
Monsanto certainly isn’t the only corporation funding research at the university. WU has a research office with an online searchable database for finding external funds for research. Yet Monsanto is one of the university’s most noticeable financial donors.
In the 1940s, the U.S. government began to donate large sums of money to universities to help spur wartime research and development to help fight World War II.
Four decades later, that government largesse has decreased, and major universities like WU market their services to corporations with slogans such as “an ideal industry partner,” providing “outstanding faculty,” “marketable results,” and “clinical trials.” A WU School of Medicine website advertises the benefits of a corporate research partnership with telephone numbers by which to contact the school for information.
“WU has done an exceedingly good job of courting corporate relations,” said Sarah Bantz, an alumna who studies corporate and academic alliances at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
“I see a huge and overarching trend in privatizing the creation of knowledge and education that benefits corporations,” she said. “Monsanto is a great example of that.”
WU and Monsanto ties
Monsanto’s worldwide headquarters, located on 210 acres in West St. Louis County, employs huge numbers of scientists in addition to its worldwide staff base. Two members of the WU Board of Trustees are former Monsanto CEOs; another is a former Monsanto president.
In 1983, Monsanto and WU started a cooperative research program now known as the Monsanto-Pharmacia/WU Biomedical Research Program. Dr. David Kipnis, a Distinguished Professor in the School of Medicine, said that he and some of his colleagues studied the idea for such a program by asking, “What can we do better together than we can do alone?” At the time, Monsanto was seeking to diversify beyond its status as a chemical company, and the university was seeking additional funds for research. Kipnis and his colleagues tried to anticipate every possible problem that might come up in a partnership with Monsanto.
Kipnis and his colleagues finally decided that combining the resources of both institutions would be mutually beneficial, and the partnership would also allow university faculty and students to experience the practical applications of their work.
Monsanto found WU well suited for the alliance because of their long-term connection, the proximity of the company’s headquarters and the university’s capability to support the research in which Monsanto was interested. Monsanto offered its laboratory facilities-the largest biotechnology research center in the world-to members of the WU community for its use.
Kipnis said that many students who are trained at the university often go to work at Monsanto after graduating.
Today, Monsanto donates $5 million of the $350 million the WU Medical School spends on research each year. Most research funds still come from the government-a good portion comes from the National Institutes of Health-but after the partnership with Monsanto took effect, the School of Medicine adopted a policy that no more than five percent of the school’s research funds could come from any one corporation.
The Monsanto-Pharmacia/WU Biomedical Research Program functions as a sort of placement program, allocating funds and lab space to those who apply and pass a screening process. An advisory committee of ten people-five from WU, five from Monsanto-sends out a bulletin to School of Medicine faculty calling for research proposals related to infectious diseases, diabetes and oncology. The committee receives and reviews about 60 submissions a year. Members jointly agree on which projects will be awarded the annual $5 million gift.
“Since the advisory committee is split between Monsanto and WU members, they have to agree on a proposal for it to pass,” Kipnis said.
Every three or four years an external review committee of eight to ten people, many of whom are Nobel laureates or distinguished faculty, interview graduate students working on the projects to ensure that neither side is being manipulated in the agreement.
Administrators and those working on Monsanto projects agree that the partnership has been beneficial. In fact, Kipnis and Dr. William Peck, the executive vice chancellor of the School of Medicine, have both testified before Congress on the Monsanto-Pharmacia/WU Biomedical Research Program as an example of the ability of a university and a corporation to work together.
A report released in June 2001 by the Business-Higher Education Forum, following a two-year study of university-industry research collaboration, pointed to the cooperation between Monsanto and WU as an example of a successful collaboration between academia and industry.
“We expand the knowledge base that can be of use to a company, but it’s not our mission as a university to be involved in product development,” Chancellor Mark Wrighton told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an interview last summer.
“Applying basic research is the forte of companies such as Pharmacia,” said Wrighton.
Monsanto in the news
Although Monsanto is renowned for the bio-engineered seeds and foods they have created, many Europeans and some Americans are afraid that Monsanto’s engineered products pose too many unknown and potentially harmful risks to consumers.
In India, anti-Monsanto efforts focused on the concern that Monsanto is developing “terminator technology” for their seeds. Indian farmers destroyed several test plots of land where Monsanto supposedly was developing this technology.
The “terminator technology” at issue involves the development of disease-resistant seeds that grow for one year only. Farmers who buy these seeds would be forced to go back to Monsanto every year to buy more seed instead of reusing second generation seed. While this might ensure steady profits for the corporation, it might also disrupt traditional Indian farming practices.
There are also fears that the plants with the “terminator” gene would cross with non-terminator plants and render even traditional crop plants sterile, depriving farmers of even their historic source of seed.
The most recent anti-Monsanto protest in St. Louis took place on November 2, 2001, and involved about a dozen people. Another anti-Monsanto protest was held in St. Louis last summer.
But Monsanto claims that they haven’t developed any “terminator” seeds. Instead, the company began making farmers in the United States sign a “Technology Use Agreement,” which not only required farmers to get rid of leftover seed, but also gave Monsanto the right to come onto the farmers’ land and take plant samples for three years after the seeds were last purchased. The company even has a toll-free “tip line” so farmers can call in and report neighbors they think are reusing Monsanto’s seeds.
This is all done to maximize Monsanto’s profits, which executives say is necessary to compensate for the millions of dollars they have spent in developing their products. Monsanto says it can take up to $300 million dollars, 10 years, and 10,000 trial fields to develop a product they can finally market.
This makes for a company that is ready and willing to litigate farmers who it believes have violated the technology use agreement.
For example, David Chaney, a farmer from Kentucky, was sued for replanting and trading some of Monsanto’s engineered soybean seeds. He eventually settled with Monsanto out of court, agreeing to pay $35,000 to the company and to refrain from criticizing its practices.
“I wish I could tell the whole story,” he told the Washington Post. “Mostly I wish I’d bought their stock instead of their seed.” He said he never wants to know which of his neighbors turned him in to the corporation.
Patent rights?
While there may not be a discernable population of university students concerned with these particular issues, students do seem more immediately concerned over patent rights. The concern over patents arises when a product is created jointly by a corporation and a university, such as Monsanto and WU.
“Universities can do a lot of research that isn’t patented,” said Bantz, who studies corporate and academic alliances. “That logic doesn’t appeal to me as a way to live.”
Jon Bird, a junior history major and President of the Conservative Leadership Association, agreed.
“You have to be extremely careful when it comes to patents; there are serious philosophical issues there,” he said. “Patents are only justified as long as they are for the common good.”
Kipnis disagreed.
“How can corporations make their money if they don’t have patents?” he said. “How can graduate students, who are trained by conducting research, pay for college if there’s no money for their research?”
Officially, WU holds all of the patent rights to inventions developed under Monsanto’s sponsorship, and university researchers can immediately publish their findings. However, Monsanto has first claim to use the patent. The university can sell inventions that Monsanto does not use to other companies.
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