Word: biotechs
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ENTREPRENEURS 'R' US Searching for seed capital? Go to www.umbrellaproject.com and submit your business plan online. Five recent Ivy League grads, whose own biotech startup went public this year, founded the site to help other young entrepreneurs get off the ground. Money comes from a fund the founders manage. One venture that got cash is aggressively marketing a natural compound to the cosmetics industry. But rejects are more plentiful. Among them: ideas for antihangover pills and designer galoshes, not to mention a state-prison employee trying to sell his package of retirement benefits...
BLUE GENES Welcome to the brave new greenhouse. Last week Florigene, a biotech company based in Australia, launched its line of violet carnations, Moonshadow, which do not exist in nature but were genetically engineered using a gene from petunias. The company plans to release a black carnation (made with an eggplant gene) next year and eventually hopes to create blue-hued roses. Maybe one day it will even make people into Smurfs...
...hiring away key employees to obtain its microchip trade secrets. Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant Cargill recently acknowledged that a rogue employee may have lifted proprietary genetic material from a competitor, an admission that effectively killed a $650 million deal to sell its North American seed division to a German biotech venture...
...thinks anything so dire will come to pass. For Monsanto, however, with a technology in its pocket and a fight on its hands, the situation is about as grim as it can get--at least in terms of public relations. "From a marketing perspective, the technology is brilliant," says biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin. "From a social perspective, it's pathological. This is a question of who controls the seeds of life...
...harmless." But the cautions also owe something to romantic--and perhaps outdated--notions about agriculture. Says population geneticist Brian Johnson of Britain's conservation watchdog English Nature: "Conventional intensive agriculture has done more damage to wildlife than anything else." Anyone who thinks that pesticide spraying is safer than biotech crops, he says, "must be nuts...