Monsanto: From Saccharin and the Dayton Project to Roundup Ready Seeds

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John Francis Queeny founded Monsanto in St. Louis in 1901 and named it after his wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto. It started with food additives, saccharin, caffeine and vanillin, then moved into sulfuric acid and PCBs in the 1920s. During World War II it ran the Dayton Project, which assisted the Manhattan Project, and later made All laundry detergent, invented ChemGrass, the AstroTurf playing surface, in 1964, and mass produced early red LEDs from 1968. The chemical era brought heavy liabilities: DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972, Monsanto was a primary maker of Agent Orange, which led to a settlement with veterans, and Congress banned PCBs in 1979.

Under Richard Mahoney and Robert Shapiro, the company turned to agricultural biotechnology, and in 1983 its scientists were among the first to genetically modify a plant cell, using a soil bacterium to deliver genes. In 1997 it spun its chemical business and PCB liabilities off into Solutia, and after a 1999 pharmaceutical merger the agricultural unit re-emerged in 2000 as a pure agricultural biotech company. Roundup Ready soybeans, corn and cotton carried a bacterial enzyme that survives glyphosate, and Bt crops made their own insect toxin. By the 2010s over 80 percent of U.S. corn and soybeans carried these traits, and farmers signed contracts barring them from saving seed.

• Patented sterile-seed technology, dubbed terminator seeds, sparked a global outcry but was never commercialized.
• Brazil's Landless Workers Movement occupied Monsanto research farms, and critics linked Bt cotton to farmer suicides in India, a causal claim the episode notes is contested.
• Former Monsanto staff moved into senior EPA and FDA posts, and Clarence Thomas, once a Monsanto attorney, later wrote an opinion upholding plant patents.
• Bayer announced a $66 billion all-cash purchase in September 2016, closed it in June 2018 and dropped the Monsanto name.
• Bayer agreed to over $10 billion in settlements by 2020, and its market value had fallen more than 60 percent by 2023.