Whitewash

by Carey Gillam

  Monsanto’s research team had been searching for nearly a decade for an herbicide that could stop both annual and perennial weeds, so the potential unlocked with glyphosate was quickly embraced by company officials. The first tests of its herbicidal prowess took place in a greenhouse in July 1970 and were so successful that company officials quickly became convinced the discovery could revolutionize the market for herbicides, which had expanded rapidly after World War II. On March 26, 1974, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent to Franz as the assignor to Monsanto that described the benefits of his invention: “The compositions of this invention provide a wide spectrum of weed control and are also extremely useful as general herbicides as well as in controlling unwanted plants in orchards, tree farms, and various crops.”3

  Franz ultimately found himself showered with awards for his work with the weed killer, including a National Medal of Technology and Innovation bestowed on him by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Franz told an interviewer for the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation that he found great satisfaction in developing “an environmentally friendly product that’s beneficial to mankind.”4 Glyphosate would be later be declared a “one in a 100-year discovery that is as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease.”5 Franz was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame and ultimately would hold over 840 U.S. and foreign patents before retiring from Monsanto in 1991.6

  Franz’s discovery came at just the right time for Monsanto. Founded in 1901 by John F. Queeny, the company—named after Queeny’s wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto—began as a maker of the artificial sweetener saccharine and then expanded into a chemical manufacturer of everything from sulfuric acid, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and plastics to synthetic fabrics, expanding its reach over the years with a series of acquisitions.

  By the 1940s, the company was one of several in the business of manufacturing the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). And in the 1960s, Monsanto became infamous as one of the primary suppliers to the U.S. government of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to kill vegetation that provided cover for the enemy. The herbicide, named for the orange-striped drums used to transport it, was a mixture of chemicals called 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, and military officials asserted for years that the combination posed little danger to people. But Agent Orange was eventually found to contain the highly toxic contaminant dioxin, a by-product created during the manufacturing process that is known to cause cancers and disrupt reproduction and development. Lawsuits and controversy persisted decades after the war ended, with both Vietnamese and U.S. service personnel alleging that Agent Orange caused a litany of ills, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, prostate cancer, and other diseases. The U.S. government eventually acknowledged the herbicide’s role in a wide range of cancers and health problems.

  By the 1970s, Monsanto was trying to put the dark cloud of dioxins behind it, and it had an agricultural division under way aimed at adding new herbicides to the company’s product line. Weed killers branded with names such as Ramrod and Lasso, invoking images of a toughened cowboy, appeared in the 1960s, and company scientists were racing for more.

  When Roundup was rolled out in the 1970s, there was little doubt it would be a hit. Company chemists had combined the active ingredient, glyphosate, with water and the surfactant polyethoxylated tallow amine (POEA) in a formulation that poisoned so effectively that weeds would shrivel and die within days.

  Many farmers during that era were using herbicides that formed a chemical barrier on the surface soil of a farm field so that weeds would start dying as they emerged through the ground. But these “preemergent” herbicides washed into streams and groundwater, carrying toxic dangers to wildlife and fish. Roundup was different, according to Monsanto and environmental experts. Evidence showed it was one of the most environmentally friendly herbicides in the history of agriculture, the company assured people.

  Monsanto proclaimed that the new herbicide would break down in the soil easily and safely. Glyphosate was also seen as less volatile than other pesticides and less likely to contaminate the atmosphere. And for people and animals, glyphosate was touted as less toxic than aspirin, the company said. Some enthusiastic advocates even proclaimed glyphosate was safe enough to drink.7 Monsanto itself wouldn’t go that far: “Glyphosate isn’t a beverage,” the company wrote in a blog post. But, it said, “all labeled uses of glyphosate are safe for human health.”8

  Monsanto geared up for high demand of its wonder product, seeking federal approval for expanded mining operations in Idaho of phosphorus—an essential ingredient in its glyphosate herbicides. In applying for the permit, Monsanto told the federal government that production was expected to surge. Monsanto had started mining phosphorus in 1952, at a time when the substance was used mainly in detergents, but by the 1970s it was all about the remarkable new herbicide. The company expected a 50 percent increase in production of the phosphates by 1978, a twofold increase in “about 1981 or 1982,” and a threefold increase in production in 1985. At that time, Monsanto was producing at least 220 million pounds of phosphorus in Idaho.9

  And the company was proved right—the world welcomed its new herbicide. The United Kingdom started using Roundup in wheat production in 1974, becoming the first nation to introduce glyphosate as a tool for food production. In the United States, Roundup initially had been introduced for noncrop uses, and then it was marketed to farmers for use on fields before planting and after harvesting their crops. Malaysia and Canada also quickly adopted Roundup as an answer to weed problems. This was well before the days of the glyphosate-tolerant Roundup Ready crops, which Monsanto developed in the mid-1990s, so farmers had to take care to keep Roundup away from their crops, or they would die alongside the weeds.

  The original branded Roundup would be named by Farm Chemicals Magazine in 1994 as one of the “top ten products that changed the face of agriculture.” Wiping out weeds meant crops had more access to soil moisture and nutrients, which typically translated to higher crop yields at harvest time. But farmers weren’t the only ones who loved Roundup. Government agencies that needed to control weeds along roads and railroad tracks, homeowners, golf course operators, and business park maintenance staff alike were quick to adopt Roundup as their herbicide of choice. The love affair continued well into the new century. As recently as 2008, Stephen O. Duke, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, and Australian weed expert Stephen B. Powles described glyphosate as “environmentally benign,” “virtually ideal,” and a “once-in-a-century” herbicide.10

  The writing was already on the wall at that point, as scientific evidence of glyphosate’s unintended impacts on the environment and human health was mounting in study after study, but it would not be until 2015 and the World Health Organization’s classification of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen that the world’s ardor for glyphosate would turn cold.

  There were early warnings, of course, but only a few. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was still in its infancy back in 1974, when Monsanto marched its new herbicide to the marketplace. The agency had been created in 1970 by President Richard Nixon as an answer to the environmental movement, an attempt to address American angst over revelations of widespread chemical pollution. Nixon’s executive order transferred fifteen units from four other government agencies to form the newly minted EPA. The move wasn’t an easy one. Staffers were forced to adjust quickly to new colleagues, nascent policies and administrative practices, and the issuing of literally thousands of new rules and regulations governing the environment. The EPA itself described that early period as “chaos.”11

  Amid the chaos, the new agency was charged with tightening pesticide regulation. Soon, lawmakers passed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 to strengthen the severely outdated Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), which had been passed in 1947 and provided little protection from long-term
exposures. The 1972 law moved pesticides from the purview of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the EPA, which was to monitor pesticide residues and strengthen protection of the environment and public health. The idea was to make it easier for the government to ban hazardous pesticides and punish people or companies for improper use.

  These directives presented a real challenge to the employees who would oversee the new pesticide registration division, most of whom came from the USDA where a culture of cooperation and affiliation with ag-related corporations was deeply ingrained and there were efforts to promote the advantages of pesticides. After all, part of the USDA’s mission was, and is, to support, sustain, and promote the nation’s agricultural industry: everyone from small farmers to the giant seed and chemical companies that sell to the farmers.

  “These people who came from USDA had very close relations with industry people, the big ag companies,” said William Sanjour,12 who worked at the EPA for thirty years until retiring in 2001. Sanjour was one of a group of EPA scientists who accused EPA officials in the 1990s of failing to investigate allegations that Monsanto falsified scientific studies on the carcinogenicity of dioxin. Monsanto’s studies had indicated no link between dioxin and cancer, but the EPA eventually classified the chemical as a “likely human carcinogen.”

  “They saw the industry people as being their clients—Monsanto, people like that,” Sanjour said. “They very much controlled EPA then and they still do.” Sanjour won a landmark lawsuit in 1995 against the U.S. government that established the First Amendment rights of federal employees to speak out publicly as whistle-blowers regarding wrongful actions by their employers.

  Allegations of collusion aside, regulating pesticides was no easy task, particularly for a new agency that was juggling political and public pressures. It would not be until June 1986—more than a decade after Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide was introduced to global markets—that the EPA issued a “registration standard” for the herbicide. And even then, EPA scientists struggled to find consensus, saying additional studies were needed.

  The new herbicide was a tough nut to crack. There are actually different “salts” of glyphosate that can be used in different ways in pesticide products. The main one, known as the “isopropylamine salt,” is key in controlling broadleaf weeds and grasses in many crops as well as on residential lawns, in forests, and along roadways. It can be formulated as a liquid or a solid and can be applied from the ground or the air. There is also what scientists call the “sodium salt” of glyphosate, used with peanuts and sugarcane to modify plant growth and hasten the ripening of fruit. It is applied as a ground spray to peanut fields and as an aerial spray to sugarcane. The “monoammonium salt” of glyphosate is also used as an herbicide/growth regulator but in only a handful of products.

  When the EPA looked at glyphosate in the early and mid-1980s, it determined that many types of additional studies were needed as scientists inside the agency wrestled over the significance of tumors in rats and other health problems seen in test animals exposed to glyphosate. But by 1993, the EPA was trumpeting the safety of Monsanto’s herbicide: “EPA’s worst case risk assessment of glyphosate’s many registered food uses concludes that human dietary exposure and risk are minimal. Existing and proposed tolerances have been reassessed, and no significant changes are needed to protect the public.”13

  The EPA said it had decided to classify glyphosate as a chemical that “shows evidence of non-carcinogenicity for humans—based on the lack of convincing evidence of carcinogenicity in adequate studies.”14 Even though glyphosate would be used by farmers, city workers, homeowners, and others, the agency claimed there was no need for data on occupational or residential exposure because regulators did not have concerns about the chemical’s toxicity, especially its carcinogenicity.

  But what the EPA did not say in that 1993 report was that its conclusion of non-carcinogenicity had actually been a reversal of a prior recommendation by EPA scientists who felt there were noteworthy links between cancer and glyphosate and that the reversal came after prolonged pressure from Monsanto. Critics suspecting collusion demanded to see the data used to justify the EPA’s reversal, but for years the agency refused to make public what it said were corporate “trade secrets” that must be protected. Hints of what transpired have recently been revealed in EPA memos that lay out the events and in other documents.15 It was February 11, 1985, eleven years after the Roundup herbicide hit the market, when eight members of a group called the Toxicology Branch Ad Hoc Committee of the EPA sat down to consider the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate. The group reviewed a packet of materials that included studies showing links between glyphosate exposure and the development of tumors or other problems in test animals. The group also was given a letter from Monsanto dated February 5, 1985, that sought to discount the significance of the tumors.16

  One 1983 study stuck out. Several groups of fifty male and fifty female mice, individually caged, were administered diets that included doses of glyphosate for twenty-four months. EPA researchers found results that showed a dose-related increase in incidences of “renal tubular adenomas” in male mice. These kidney tumors were described as a rare type, and the incidence rate seen in the mice exposed to glyphosate, compared with the rate seen in control groups of mice not exposed to the pesticide, could not be ignored. Though adenomas are generally benign—noncancerous—they have the potential to become malignant. Even in noncancerous stages, they can be harmful to many organs. “Review of the mouse oncogenicity study indicates that glyphosate is oncogenic, producing renal tubule adenomas, a rare tumor, in a dose-related manner,” a top EPA toxicologist wrote in an internal memorandum.17

  There were a number of other concerning research results, including another study in which thyroid tumors were observed in some female rats and tumors were noted in the testes of male rats. But the agency showed less concern with those results, concluding that the dose levels in the rat-feeding research were inadequate to assess the chemical’s carcinogenic potential for that species. Still, the scientists were worried enough by the kidney tumors in mice that they ultimately determined glyphosate should be considered a Category C oncogen. An “oncogen” is defined as a substance that causes tumors to form. And in EPA lingo, “Category C” translated to “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”18

  That finding did not sit well with Monsanto, and it soon became clear that the 1985 decision was not going to be the end of the discussion. Monsanto continued to protest that links to cancer were unproven and the kidney tumor concerns were unfounded. On April 3, 1985, George Levinskas, Monsanto’s manager for environmental assessment and toxicology, noted in an internal memorandum to another company scientist that the company had arranged for Marvin Kuschner, a noted pathologist and founding dean of the medical school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, to review the kidney tissue slides. Curiously, though Kuschner had not yet even accessed the slides, Levinskas implied in his memo that a favorable outcome from Kuschner’s review was ensured: “Kuschner will review kidney sections and present his evaluation of them to EPA in an effort to persuade the agency that the observed tumors are not related to glyphosate,” Levinskas wrote.19

  Levinskas, who died in 2005, was also involved in efforts a decade earlier to downplay damaging findings from a study that found rats exposed to the company’s PCBs developed tumors, documents filed in PCB litigation revealed.20

  Kuschner’s subsequent reexamination did—as Monsanto intended—determine the tumors were not due to glyphosate. Looking over slides of the mouse tissue from the 1983 study, Kuschner identified a small kidney tumor in one control group of the mice—those that had not received glyphosate. No one had noted such a tumor in the original pathology report.

  The finding was highly significant, as well as controversial, because it provided a scientific basis for a conclusion that the tumors seen in the mice that were exposed to glyphosate were not noteworthy after all. Additionally, Monsanto provided th
e EPA with an October 1985 report from a “pathology working group” that supported Kuschner’s work and also rebutted the finding of the connection between glyphosate and the kidney tumors seen in the 1983 study. The pathology working group said the outcomes reflected a “normal biologic variation” and that “spontaneous chronic renal disease” was “commonly seen in aged mice.”21 Monsanto provided the report to the EPA stamped as a “trade secret” to be kept from the prying eyes of the public.

  The EPA’s own scientists did not agree, however, saying that additional examination of the tissue slides did not reveal a tumor in the control group. Still, the reports by the outside pathologists brought into the debate by Monsanto helped push the EPA to launch a reexamination of the research. And by February 1986 an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel had dubbed the findings equivocal; the incidences of tumors were not statistically significant enough to warrant the cancer linkage, though the panel did note that “there may be reason for concern.”22 That advisory panel told the EPA that the studies should be repeated in hopes of more definitive findings and that glyphosate should be classified in what the agency at that time called Group D—“not classifiable as to human carcinogenicity.” That category was used when the agency determined there was inadequate human and animal evidence linking a substance to cancer or when data were lacking. Later that year, the EPA issued a registration standard that required a range of additional studies to look at toxicology, residues, and environmental issues surrounding glyphosate. The agency specifically asked for a repeat of the mouse oncogenicity study, but Monsanto had no desire to repeat the work and refused to do so. The company argued that “there is no relevant scientific or regulatory justification for repeating the glyphosate mouse oncogenicity study.”23 Instead, the company provided EPA officials with historical control data that it argued supported its attempt to further downplay the tumor incidences seen in the worrisome 1983 study. The company said the tumors in mice appear “with some regularity” and were probably attributable to “genetic or environmental” factors. “It is the judgement of Monsanto scientists that the weight-of-evidence strongly supports a conclusion that glyphosate is not oncogenic in the mouse.”24 After meetings with Monsanto, the EPA’s toxicology branch expressed doubts about the validity of Monsanto’s data, but eventually EPA officials conceded, stating that they would drop the requirement for a repeated mouse study.