The Corn in Cornell
by Chris Cumo
PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. Eisenhower foresaw in 1961 the rise
of a military-industrial complex but missed an equally potent
union: the symbiosis between university and corporation. In
1980 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that scientists may patent
life. The decision was a boon to agricultural scientists,
giving them exclusive rights to the profits of a new breed
of crop or livestock for the duration of its patent.
The year of the court’s ruling, Monsanto, an agri-chemical
firm, gave Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and
Life Sciences $2 million to derive crops and agricultural
chemicals. Monsanto gained the rights to them and access to
the college’s laboratories, greenhouses and field plots. From
the initial grant of $2 million in 1980, Monsanto gave the
college nearly $14 million in 1990 and $42.4 million in 2000,
making this the largest scientific partnership between a university
and a corporation in the United States. “Our relationship
with Monsanto has been mutually beneficial,” said Cornell
professor of crop physiology Ralph Obendorf.
The core of this relationship has been the cooperative work
between scientists at Cornell and Monsanto. Today nearly all
of Monsanto’s scientists have done research with their counterparts
at Cornell, observes senior Monsanto biotechnologist Philip
DeLong. “We believe our scientists are at their best when
they work in teams,” he said. “The sort of cross-fertilization
between researchers here and at Cornell is the great strength
of our partnership.” Janice Thies, associate professor of
soil biology at Cornell, estimates that a third of postdoctoral
fellows and perhaps 20 percent of graduate students in her
department fund at least part of their research through a
grant from Monsanto.
The partnership between Cornell and Monsanto has yielded
a harvest of new agricultural chemicals and crops. In 1992
a team of chemists at Monsanto and Cornell developed the first
of a new generation of herbicides safe for use on corn and
soybeans. U.S. farmers spray them on more acres of soybeans
than the herbicide of any other company.
In tandem with the herbicides agronomists have breed new
soybean varieties that are herbicide resistant, allowing farmers
to spray herbicides several times during the growing season.
Other scientists have derived mathematical models to predict
the optimal times to apply herbicides, noted Gary Fick, professor
of agronomy at Cornell. Scientists at Monsanto and Cornell
have also breed soybeans and corn resistant to fungi that
attack the roots and stems of these crops, breed genetically-engineered
tomatoes that last longer on a grocer’s shelf than traditional
varieties, and breed rice with a higher protein content than
conventional breeds of rice.
“Agriculture is big business,” noted William Cox, associate
professor of crop science at Cornell, “and it rests on a bedrock
of science.” This science profited Monsanto almost $200 million
in 1999. “Money is always nice,” said Cox, “but nothing beats
the thrill of doing cutting-edge science.”
