Why would they champion the competition's product? 'Twas Geigy, no? cn
Just wanted to post this for consideration...(not as 'fact'...for Frank)
Welcome To The Spin Machine
By Michael Manville
SNIP
The oldest and most aggressive of the food biotech companies, Monsanto deserves a close look from anyone interested in genetic engineering. It was founded in 1901, as Monsanto Chemical, to make saccharin, a substance whose production was at that time monopolized by Germany. It began as a small concern--the initial investment was $5,000--but grew rapidly and diversified. In 1929 it began to produce polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and eventually became the world's largest supplier of them. PCBs had a variety of uses, but were used mostly to insulate electrical transformers. Evidence of their toxicity was first reported in the 1930s, and in the 1960s Swedish scientists documented high levels of them in dying wildlife. PCBs were finally banned in 1979, and the United States has classified them as a "probable human carcinogen." PCBs have left a broad legacy of environmental degradation; they are the major pollutant at a number of Superfund sites, and most notoriously in the Hudson River, where years of PCB discharge from General Electric has left 2.6 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment.
Like other chemical companies, Monsanto was also a producer of DDT, the pesticide famously indicted by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Monsanto had actually stopped making the pesticide by the time Carson's book was first serialized in the New Yorker, but the company, fearful that public attitudes would turn against pesticides in general, took action nevertheless. Rather than confront Carson's evidence, however, it hired a ghostwriter to pen The Desolate Year, a parody of Silent Spring that depicted a pesticide-free America being ravaged by insects. The Desolate Year was mailed free to over 5,000 media outlets, and applauded by Walter Sullivan in the New York Times.
The late 1960s would bring other problems, however. In the company's 1977 official history, Faith, Hope and $5,000: The Monsanto Story, the author--a former Monsanto PR director--looks back wistfully at the tumult of the sixth decade, and notes with sympathy that while Dow was being castigated for its involvement with napalm, Monsanto had little to do with war-related controversy. The author does concede, however, that the company was "occasionally mentioned as a manufacturer of 2,4,5-T weed and brush killers, some of which were identified as defoliants used during the war in Vietnam."
This sentence could be called disingenuous, or more accurately an astounding act of omission. It is, in truth, an extremely oblique way of saying that Monsanto made Agent Orange. The world's most notorious defoliant is indeed created by combining the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4,D, and frankly Monsanto sells itself short by using such sterile language to describe its product (the sentence I just quoted is the most the book says about AO, and the defoliant is never named). Although a number of corporations made Agent Orange, and all assured the Defense Department that it was perfectly safe for humans, Monsanto's version was significantly more potent than those of its competitors. When a coalition of Vietnam Veterans successfully sued the manufacturers of AO, a judge ordered that Monsanto pay 45.5 percent of the damages, in recognition of its product being so much more heavily laden with dioxins.
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=234
