Dear Editor,

In 1985 Monsanto purchased G.D. Searle, the chemical company that held the patent to aspartame, the active ingredient in Nutra Sweet. Monsanto was apparently untroubled by aspartame's clouded past, including a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry, comprised of three independent scientists, which confirmed that it "might induce brain tumors."

The FDA had actually banned the drug based on this finding, only to have Searle Chairman Donald Rumsfeld (currently the Secretary of Defense) vow to "call in his markers," to get it approved.

On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener, and Reagan's new FDA commissioner, Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry's decision.

It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision, but Hull then installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then broke the tie in aspartame's favor. Hull later left the FDA under allegations of impropriety, served briefly as Provost at New York Medical College, and then took a position with Burston-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for both Monsanto and GD Searle. Since that time he has never spoken publicly about aspartame.

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In 1982 the town of Times Beach, Missouri, which is located adjacent to a Monsanto plant, was found to be so contaminated with dioxins that it had to be evacuated. An investigation into Monsanto's culpability was stalled when the Reagan Administration, citing Executive Privilege, ordered EPA Administrator Anne Burford to withhold key documents from a House Committee that had subpoenaed them. Reagan, it should be noted, had long wanted to destroy the EPA, and absent his ability to so he appointed Burford to run it. She was cited for contempt of Congress for her refusal to cooperate in the investigation of Monsanto, and later forced to resign in 1984 amid charges of misusing Superfund money. Her top assistant, Rita Lavelle, spent four months in jail for perjury for the same reason. Lavelle had been suspected of destroying documents related to the Times Beach case, and she regularly attended luncheons with Monsanto executives.

In 1990 the EPA's regulatory division reported that Monsanto had "submitted false information to EPA," and "doctored" samples of herbicides given to the US Department of Agriculture. In urging a criminal investigation of the company, the division noted that:

Monsanto covered up the dioxin contamination of its products. Monsanto either failed to report contamination, substituted false information purporting to show no contamination or submitted samples to the government for analysis which had been specifically prepared so that dioxin contamination did not exist. The litany goes on. East St. Louis, Illinois, where the company manufactured PCBs, still has the highest rate of fetal death in the state. Monsanto has paid settlements to its own employees, who sued the company on grounds that it knowingly exposed them to dangerous substances. It ranks fifth on the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory, having expelled 37 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the United States. It is identified as a "potentially responsible party" at 48 Superfund sites, and since 1986 it has paid $148.5 million in fines and settlements.

And in 1996, it began to buy up agricultural research companies. February of 1996 saw Monsanto partner with Dekalb Genetics, and three months later it bought Agracetus for $150 million. In 1997 it acquired Asgrow Agronomics, and days later spent $1.2 billion to pick up Holden Foundation Seeds. The shopping spree continued from there: Calgene, Cargill, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Delta and Pine Land, Water Health International. All told, Monsanto spent $8.4 billion on companies most people have never heard of. The effort pushed the company to its fiscal limits; its stock plummeted, and observers speculated that it would be taken over, perhaps by DuPont (it was ultimately bought out by Pharmecia). But it emerged controlling 85 percent of the U.S. market for cotton seed, 40 percent of the market for soy, and an awful lot of agricultural genetic technology.

To complement its new acquisitions, the company also gave itself a corporate makeover. It now has one web page covered with butterflies, and another that depicts farmers conferring in a lush and vast field. The corporate literature now liberally uses eco-buzzwords like "sustainability," and the company has styled itself a "life sciences" corporation. It sports the motto "Life. Health. Hope."

This is all well and good, but given the company's past, one wonders why the federal government has given it such leeway in the creation of food. Can a new PR campaign and the "life sciences" moniker really erase fifty years of what could at best called horrible misjudgment, and at worst outright disregard for human safety?

The company thinks so. The past is, after all, the past. "There have been times in Monsanto's 94-year history," CEO Robert Shapiro wrote in the 1995 Monsanto Environmental Review, "when we, like others, weren't as aware of our actions as we should have been. Those days have been over for a long time."

This was three years after the FDA had decided that biotech foods required no labeling. That decision, it should be noted, was written by an FDA Deputy Commissioner who, prior to joining the agency, had spent seven years working at Monsanto. By 1999, he was working there again.