Monsanto Whistleblower Says Genetically Engineered Crops May Cause Disease

He left his job and accepted a posi­tion at Monsanto, ris­ing quickly to become the facil­i­ta­tor for GM cot­ton sales in California and Arizona. He would often repeat Shapiro’s vision to cus­tomers, researchers, even fel­low employ­ees. After about three months, he vis­ited Monsanto’s St. Louis head­quar­ters for the first time for new employee train­ing. There too, he took the oppor­tu­nity to let his col­leagues know how enthu­si­as­tic he was about Monsanto’s tech­nol­ogy that was going to reduce waste, decrease poverty and help the world. Soon after the meet­ing, how­ever, his world was shaken.

“A vice pres­i­dent pulled me aside,” recalled Kirk. “He told me some­thing like, ‘Wait a sec­ond. What Robert Shapiro says is one thing. But what we do is some­thing else. We are here to make money. He is the front man who tells a story. We don’t even under­stand what he is saying.’”

Kirk felt let down. “I went in there with the idea of help­ing and heal­ing and came out with ‘Oh, I guess it is just another profit-oriented com­pany.’” He returned to California, still hold­ing out hopes that the new tech­nol­ogy could make a difference.

Possible Toxins in GM Plants

Kirk was devel­op­ing the mar­ket in the West for two types of GM cot­ton. Bt cot­ton was engi­neered with a gene from a soil bac­terium, Bacillus thuringien­sis. Organic farm­ers use the nat­ural form of the bac­terium as an insec­ti­cide, spray­ing it occa­sion­ally dur­ing times of high pest infes­ta­tion. Monsanto engi­neers, how­ever, iso­lated and then altered the gene that pro­duces the Bt-toxin, and inserted it into the DNA of the cot­ton plant. Now every cell of their Bt cot­ton pro­duces a toxic pro­tein. The other vari­ety was Roundup Ready® cot­ton. It con­tains another bac­te­r­ial gene that enables the plant to sur­vive an oth­er­wise toxic dose of Monsanto’s Roundup® her­bi­cide. Since the patent on Roundup’s main active ingre­di­ent, glyphosate, was due to expire in 2000, the com­pany was plan­ning to sell Roundup Ready seeds that were bun­dled with their Roundup her­bi­cide, effec­tively extend­ing their brand’s dom­i­nance in the her­bi­cide market.

In the sum­mer of 1997, Kirk spoke with a Monsanto sci­en­tist who was doing some tests on Roundup Ready cot­ton. Using a “Western blot” analy­sis, the sci­en­tist was able to iden­tify dif­fer­ent pro­teins by their mol­e­c­u­lar weight. He told Kirk that the GM cot­ton not only con­tained the intended pro­tein pro­duced by the Roundup Ready gene, but also extra pro­teins that were not nor­mally pro­duced in the plant. These unknown pro­teins had been cre­ated dur­ing the gene inser­tion process.

Gene inser­tion was done using a gene gun (par­ti­cle bom­bard­ment). Kirk, who has an under­grad­u­ate degree in bio­chem­istry, under­stood this to be “a kind of bar­baric and messy method of genetic engi­neer­ing, where you use a gun-like appa­ra­tus to bom­bard the plant tis­sue with genes that are wrapped around tiny gold par­ti­cles.” He knew that par­ti­cle bom­bard­ment can cause unpre­dictable changes and muta­tions in the DNA, which might result in new types of proteins.

The sci­en­tist dis­missed these newly cre­ated pro­teins in the cot­ton plant as unim­por­tant back­ground noise, but Kirk wasn’t con­vinced. Proteins can have aller­genic or toxic prop­er­ties, but no one at Monsanto had done a safety assess­ment on them. “I was afraid at that time that some of these pro­teins may be toxic.” He was par­tic­u­larly con­cerned that the rogue pro­teins “might pos­si­bly lead to mad cow or some other prion-type diseases.”

Kirk had just been study­ing mad cow dis­ease (bovine spongi­form encephalopa­thy) and its human coun­ter­part, Creutzfeldt-Jakob dis­ease (CJD). These fatal dis­eases had been tracked to a class of pro­teins called pri­ons. Short for “pro­teina­ceous infec­tious par­ti­cles,” pri­ons are improp­erly folded pro­teins, which cause other healthy pro­teins to also become mis­folded. Over time, they cause holes in the brain, severe dys­func­tion and death. Prions sur­vive cook­ing and are believed to be trans­mit­table to humans who eat meat from infected “mad” cows. The dis­ease may incu­bate unde­tected for about 2 to 8 years in cows and up to 30 years in humans.

When Kirk tried to share his con­cerns with the sci­en­tist, he real­ized, “He had no idea what I was talk­ing about; he had not even heard of pri­ons. And this was at a time when Europe had a great con­cern about mad cow dis­ease and it was just before the Nobel prize was won by Stanley Prusiner for his dis­cov­ery of prion pro­teins.” Kirk said “These Monsanto sci­en­tists are very knowl­edge about tra­di­tional prod­ucts, like chem­i­cals, her­bi­cides and pes­ti­cides, but they don’t under­stand the pos­si­ble harm­ful out­comes of genetic engi­neer­ing, such as patho­phys­i­ol­ogy or prion pro­teins. So I am explain­ing to him about the poten­tial unto­ward effects of these for­eign pro­teins, but he just did not understand.”

Endangering the Food Supply

At this time, Roundup Ready cot­ton vari­eties were just being intro­duced into other regions but were still being field-tested in California. California vari­eties had not yet been com­mer­cial­ized. But Kirk came to find out that Monsanto was feed­ing the cot­ton plants used in its test plots to cattle.

“I had great issue with this,” he said. “I had worked for Abbot Laboratories doing research, doing test plots using Bt sprays from bac­te­ria. We would never take a test plot and put into the food sup­ply, even with some­what benign chemistries. We would always destroy the test plot mate­r­ial and not let any­thing into the food sup­ply. Now we entered into a new era of genetic engi­neer­ing. The stan­dard was not the same as with pes­ti­cides. It was much lower, even though it prob­a­bly should have been much higher.”

Kirk com­plained to the Ph.D. in charge of the test plot about feed­ing the exper­i­men­tal plants to cows. He explained that unknown pro­teins, includ­ing pri­ons, might even effect humans who con­sume the cow’s milk and meat. The sci­en­tist replied, “Well that’s what we’re doing every­where else and that’s what we’re doing here.” He refused to destroy the plants.

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