Ghost Credits | Academia's Hidden Industry Ties
episode
Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
29 min
3 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Sometimes it feels like the news is full of things that have never happened before. And that is not exactly true. In fact, it may have happened this very week, hundreds or thousands of years ago. I'm Sally Helm, host of the podcast History This Week from the History Channel. Trade embargoes? Thomas Jefferson tried them. Rent too high? We've been arguing about that for a while. Each episode is proof. The past isn't that far away. Listen to History This Week, available now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bruce Chasse was kind of a big deal in his field. He was a food scientist with decades of experience, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois, a former researcher at the NIH. So when Bruce Chasse weighed in on something, people listened. One of the things he liked to weigh in on was GMOs and herbicides. He was a vocal defender of both. Chassie defended GMOs in the media and on stages to audiences around the world, like in this presentation at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment.
Our risk perception is not very scientific. In fact, it's not rational, it's not quantitative. We are disproportionately fearful of things that are new, that we don't understand, that we can't control, and about which there is uncertainty. And I think that a lot of the claimed risks of GMOs that the public is concerned about are simply falsehoods that have been propagated.
You wouldn't know it from his speeches, but Bruce Chassie was not independent. He was working with Monsanto, a major producer of GMOs and herbicides. And he wasn't alone. Several other academics were doing the exact same thing, defending GMOs in public while quietly collaborating with the company that made them.
professors and academics really have the trust of the public. So Monsanto used academics to carry the messaging for them.
I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, how one of the most powerful companies in agriculture recruited academics into its PR war.
Tom Philpott has covered food and agriculture policy for almost two decades. He's seen a lot change in that time, but one thing has stayed the same. One company has dominated what American farmers grow, Monsanto.
By 2005, when I started writing about this stuff, Monsanto is already dominating the seed industry. And my very first blog post was about their market power.
Monsanto's market power is even more impressive when you look at the company's origins. Monsanto didn't start as an agriculture company. It started as a chemical producer.
Next time you fly, look around you. You'll see many ways Monsanto made your trip a little bit better. The luxurious carpeting of Acroland acrylic. The tables made of Monsanto plastics. The dessert cakes made light and fluffy thanks to Monsanto food research.
Monsanto made a lot of chemicals that were very good for business and very bad for people. One of those was the chemical known as PCBs.
PCBs are sort of the forever chemicals of mid-century America. Their harms were very, very apparent early on, and the company kept marketing them well after they knew how damaging they were.
PCBs were eventually banned by the U.S. government, and that meant Monsanto had to figure out what came next. The company pivoted, in a big way, to agriculture. One of its chemists developed a new chemical, glyphosate. It was extremely effective at killing weeds. And in the 1970s, Monsanto began selling it under the brand name Roundup.
Roundup herbicide by Monsanto. There's never been a herbicide like it before. Roundup controls many of the toughest grasses and weeds.
Sales of Roundup were strong, but like other herbicides on the market, it had a limitation. Once crops sprouted, Roundup didn't just kill the weeds, it killed the crops too. So farmers could only spray it at certain times of the year, until Monsanto changed the equation. In the early 1980s, company scientists genetically modified seeds to tolerate glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. And by 1996, Roundup Ready seeds were on the market. Now, farmers could spray their seeds whenever they needed to.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–14:46
2
How did Monsanto transform from a chemical company into an agricultural giant?
14:46–20:46
3
What made Roundup and glyphosate a game-changer for farmers and Monsanto's profits?
20:46–28:34
4
When did safety concerns about glyphosate and Roundup first emerge?
28:34–29:16
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
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