John Bedbrook

My name is John Bedbrook, and I was formerly head of biotechnology at DuPont.

We went to China to form this venture because, you know, rice was not a big crop of what was then Pioneer Hybrid Seed, which was owned by DuPont. It was largely a corn seed company. You know, we thought it would be smart to go where the market was.

You know, all of the geneticists and breeders had had to go off in the Cultural Revolution to work on farms and so on and so forth, and were no longer available to provide breeding expertise to the seed companies. Plant genetics and plant varietal development was in very poor shape in China. And so that was the reason that they were so open to having plants

The major players in the United States invest, obviously, in germplasm development in China.

We had to be minority holders and we decided to work on rice and develop ways of creating male sterols that were very efficient and would lead to a broader germplasm input into hybrid rice in China.

In China, it's kind of a permit per experiment. So you design an experiment and you apply to the government for a permit to do that experiment. And we proceeded along this sort of line for several years and then suddenly they just ghosted us. They no longer were providing us with permits and not explaining why they were not giving them.

When the permits stopped coming in, we had to lay everybody off. So, and that was the end of the company. And, you know, I spent quite a considerable amount of my time visiting members of the National Chinese Agricultural Academy, trying to seek an explanation for what was going on. I sort of bothered them for months and finally they just said, we're sorry, We can't help you.

And that was that was basically the end of the story. Yeah.

No, they were very cautious about what they said. They just said they couldn't help me.

Well, first of all, it feels devastating. Second of all, it feels unbelievably wasteful.

Obviously, technology comes with patents and it becomes generic. But this was far from generic technology. It was proprietary technology. And, you know, it's hard to estimate... the cost of that build-up, but the total investment in developing genetic engineering for crops was billions of dollars.

You know, I was totally miserable about the whole affair. I mean, obviously it wasn't the most important thing that we were managing, but it was just the way it was sort of ended. It seemed terribly unfair and inexplicable. And I guess to take a cynical point of view, they got to a point where they said, OK, we've had enough of their help, let's just do it ourselves from here on out.

It's not just a specific example where our particular methodology was adopted and then mysteriously disappeared. It was multiple cases. I mean, I visited companies that were... Their mission was simply to reproduce the work of Monsanto and other U.S.

agricultural enterprises that had invested in developing the technology of genetic engineering, and then they were building the same insect-resistant and herbicide-resistant plants. It was just blatant. I mean, I guess the sort of attitude is that, you know, this is for China, so, you know... It's okay.

But clearly, you know, if you want global intellectual property to be meaningful, it's clearly not okay.

China is a major investor, probably the major national investor in agricultural technology now.