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MONSANTO NIXES TERMINATOR SEEDS Industry leader halts development of controversial plant technology
M onsanto, the leading developer and marketer of genetically engineered crops, says it won't com
mercialize technologies that render second-generation seeds sterile. Such "terminator" technologies have been a contentious issue in the intensifying debate surrounding genetically modified plants and foods. Although companies see such technologies as ways to protect and recoup their R&D investments through seed sales, opponents see them as a threat to farmers' centuries-old practice of collecting seeds from year to year for replanting, an economic necessity in developing countries.
Monsanto will gain ownership of the technology through its still-pending acquisition of cottonseed producer Delta & Pine Land. The Scott, Miss.-based company jointly developed and patented the technology—still several years away from commercialization—through a cooperative R&D agreement with the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). A U.S. patent was awarded in March 1998.
Delta & Pine Land is free to do what it wants with the technology until the acquisition by Monsanto goes through. As a federal agency, ARS says it is committed to transferring technology to the private sector and making it widely available for use in public and private research. In line with this policy, Delta & Pine Land has agreed to make the technology available for sublicensing to other seed producers.
Monsanto says that licensing will stop when—and if—it completes its purchase of Delta & Pine Land. It has been 17 months since the $1.2 billion stock deal—now to close by Dec. 31—was announced. Antitrust concerns have apparently caused the delay.
'The need for companies to protect and gain a return on their investments in agricultural innovation is real," says Monsanto Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert B. Shapiro. The company holds patents on other gene protection technologies, such as one that would inactivate
Shapiro: respond publicly to concerns
or control only the specific gene for a genetic trait. "We are not currently investing resources to develop these technologies," Shapiro adds, "but we do not rule out their future development and use."
Monsanto "continuels] to support the open, independent airing of all the issues raised by the use of gene protection systems," Shapiro says. 'We renew
the pledge we made in April that we will not make any decision to commercialize a gene protection technology until full airing of the issues is complete and we have responded publicly to the concerns that are raised."
Monsanto's position was expressed by Shapiro in a letter to Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, New York City. The foundation has invested more than $100 million in plant biotechnology research and has trained plant scientists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As part of a continuing dialogue with Monsanto's board of directors, Conway had urged the company to drop the terminator technology (C&EN, July 19, page 42).
Groups opposed to the technology offered a mixed response to Monsanto's pledge, viewing it as only one small victory, at best, although coming from the leading ag biotech producer. According to the Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), U.K.-based AstraZeneca informed the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in June that it would not commercialize sterile seed technologies. However, RAFI says more than a dozen companies and public institutes have at least 31 patents that include claims involving seed sterilization.
"Monsanto has taken a positive step," says RAFI Executive Director Pat Moo-ney. The foundation has been waging a campaign to stop gene protection and trait-control technologies. Without government action to firmly reject these technologies, he believes they will be commercialized within a few years "with potentially disastrous consequences."
Ann Thayer
ICI completes its metamorphosis With two deals in the past two weeks, Britain's ICI has completed its transformation from a commodities chemical producer to a specialty chemicals company.
Last week, it sold its acrylics business to Britain's Ineos for approximately $835 million. That sale came hard on the heels of ICI's divestment a week earlier of its international fluoropolymers business, which went to Japan's Asahi Glass for $136 million.
The transformation process has not always gone smoothly. However, as ICI Chief Executive Brendan O'Neill says, "we have completed more than 50 di
vestments" since May 1997. Gross proceeds from the divestment program now exceed nearly $10 billion.
ICI says its just-sold acrylics division is the world leader in methacrylates, producing the compounds in a wide variety of forms ranging from resins to acrylic sheet for construction. Some of that business is the result of a product swap. Several years ago, DuPont swapped its acrylics business for ICI's nylon operations.
ICI's acrylics business now employs about 2,000 people worldwide and has production sites in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Last year, it had sales of $868 mil-
OCTOBER11,1999 C&EN 17
