Word: biotech
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When a press release doesn't work, other groups take to the streets. In Montreal last week, activists opposed to genetically engineered foods demonstrated outside a global biotech conference. In France last year, similarly inclined groups dumped apples and manure in front of many local McDonald's, protesting their use of genetically engineered beef and grain. And last week a radical group that calls itself the Earth Liberation Front took responsibility for setting fire to a biotech lab at Michigan State University on New Year...
Even in this gilded era of unsurpassed profit for biotech and pharmaceutical conglomerates, one company always struck analysts as something of a black sheep. The Monsanto Company, whose subsidiary Searle makes the wildly successful arthritis drug Celebrex, has been casting around for a merger partner for over a year, and now, executives say, the search is over. Monsanto will merge with Pharmacia & Upjohn, joining the ranks of other mega-merger firms like Astra-Zeneca and Rhone-Poulenc-Hoechst, to form a corporation worth about $52 billion. Why did it take so long for Monsanto to find its mate...
...everyone agrees. The Food and Drug Administration currently exercises almost total control over the information flow from clinical trials, and while biotech companies certainly don't want their human research subjects to die, they do want to keep a tight lid on their proprietary research. "This is a highly commercial undertaking," says TIME correspondent Dick Thompson, "and most of the tests to date have failed." Still, companies that do hit on the right combination are spinning so much genetic straw into pure gold, and they don't want their competitors learning Rumplestiltskin's secrets on their dime...
Personally, I just don't know enough to be worried about biotech, although I figure that if anything is going to do in my visiting in-laws this Thanksgiving, it's going to be Salmonella from an undercooked bird or their taxi ride out to LaGuardia...
...wanted to check out the alternatives. My first stop was the Union of Concerned Scientists, where I met two, well, concerned scientists. Margaret Mellon and Jane Rissler have spent years studying food safety, and they've got a lot of doubts about biotech. I asked them what I could do to avoid gene-altered foods this year. They said it would take some work. No one knows exactly which of the thousands of products for sale use gene-altered crops like corn or soy. It could be more than half. They said I'd do best staying away from processed...