A good article. From St. Louis Post Dispatch website:
postnet.com
+++++++++++++++++
Posted: Monday, April 26, 1999 | 12:19 p.m.
Reaping a genetic harvest
By Robert Steyer Of The Post-Dispatch
"It wasn't a flash of genius and inspiration," said Ernest G. Jaworski, the head scout in Monsanto's pioneer work on
genetically engineered plants. "It was an accumulation of research and ideas."
A lot of work and a little serendipity turned
Monsanto from a commodity chemical company to a developer of crops that tolerate herbicides and fight insect invaders with built-in defense systems.
On Tuesday, Jaworski and three colleagues will be honored in a Washington, D.C., ceremony, receiving from President Bill Clinton the National Medal of Technology, an award established by Congress in 1980 to honor innovation.
The scientists will be recognized for transforming plants: inserting genes with special traits into plants, altering the plants and making sure the new genes worked and making sure the new genes worked in regenerated plants and their offspring.
THE HURDLES were great. Imagine a scientist -- Jaworski -- trying to convince executives of a big chemical company that future profits would depend on fewer chemicals.
The path was filled with false starts and outright failures. Imagine executives reacting to high biotech research costs when nearly 20 years' work on another plant-altering method ended in an expensive dead end.
Given that environment, how did Jaworski prevail?
"The whole process of discovery is like the stock market," said Jaworski, who retired in 1991 after nearly 40 years at Monsanto. "I'd like to draw the process in a straight line, but it's a process with a lot of jagged lines."
During several months in 1980 and 1981, Jaworski assembled a research team that, in just a few years, built the foundation for Monsanto's plant biotechnology program.
By the late 1980s their work was being field tested; by the mid-1990s, their research had become commercial products.
Each team member had a different research specialty. Only one, Robert T. Fraley, had a farm background. "Most experiments end in failure," Fraley said. "There were a lot of steps that had to work. If any one step hadn't worked, we would have failed."
It's hard to get these scientists under the same roof, or even on the same conference call. But three recently met with the Post-Dispatch -- the fourth was connected by telephone -- to discuss what was once called "the new biology."
The peripatetic Fraley, based at the corporate headquarters in Creve Coeur, is co-president of Monsanto's agricultural sector. Robert B. Horsch is co-president of the sustainable development unit in Wisconsin. Stephen G. Rogers directs Monsanto's European crop biotech work from Cambridge, England.
Fraley was hired after he and Jaworski met at Boston's Logan Airport. Jaworski was flying to one scientific conference; Fraley was flying to another. Both had to change planes in Boston, and Jaworski made his sales pitch at an airport seafood restaurant.
FRALEY didn't agree immediately, but he joined Monsanto soon after the airport rendezvous. "It was clear our crop chemical platform would be limited," Fraley said. "This corporation's decision to make a big bet financially on biotechnology was revolutionary."
Rogers had just settled into a teaching job at the University of Indiana School of Medicine after having earned a doctorate in biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
"I got a letter from some guy at Monsanto, but I didn't know what Monsanto was," said Rogers. "Someone said it's the company that makes wear-dated clothing."
Rogers read the letter on a Friday and promptly pitched it into a garbage can. Heading to work with his wife on Monday, Rogers said his wife suggested that it would be polite to at least call back. He did, and Jaworski hired him.
HORSCH was aiming for a research career. "I didn't know much about industry or academics," said Horsch, who wrote a dozen letters to prospective employers.
Horsch was doing post-doctoral work in plant physiology at the University of Saskatchewan. Researchers there remembered Jaworski, who had studied cell tissue cultures there in 1972. So Horsch put Jaworski's name on his job-hunting mailing list.
Jaworski, who grew up "in the wilds of Minneapolis," joined Monsanto in 1952. His interest in science was spurred by a ninth-grade physics teacher and a 12th-grade chemistry teacher.
His interest in agriculture was the indirect result of a job that he held as a youngster, pulling weeds out of yards for 10 cents an hour. "I knew I didn't want to get into agriculture under those circumstances," he said.
Jaworski, a biochemist, joined Monsanto just as the company began developing agricultural chemicals. The blockbuster herbicide Roundup was still more than 20 years away from commercialization.
ALTHOUGH Jaworski didn't invent the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, he did discover the mechanism by which the chemical killed plants. His research led to Monsanto's technology that enables crops to tolerate the weedkiller.
"By the late 1960s and early 1970s I began thinking, what would you do next if you got all the pesticides and herbicides that you needed," Jaworski recalled. But Monsanto's motto was not "Better Living Without Chemistry."
IN THE mid-1960s, the company had begun research on plant growth regulators (PGR), chemicals that could modify plant traits by regulating their growth. The huge commitment of personnel and money to PGR ended nearly 20 years later.
Despite having ideas that didn't fit the mainstream of Monsanto's commercial view, Jaworski persisted. "It took quite a few years to sell the concept," he said. "I had a lot of discussions, but I didn't feel there was overt opposition."
Once Jaworski had assembled his team, the pressure was intense -- not for fear of financial support but for fear that some other company or university would beat Monsanto to the finish line.
Horsch remembers entering his lab one morning and seeing an academic paper from the National Academy of Sciences heralding someone else's discovery for plant transformation. "I thought we'd been scooped," he said.
Then, he looked at the paper carefully. Fraley had prepared a fake report.
"I always approached research from a pessimistic view, and I am pleased when it would work," Horsch confessed to his colleagues.
"You mean we would have moved faster if you had a better attitude?" asked Rogers, as his teammates convulsed in laughter.
AMIDST the banter and camraderie, the three younger scientists bowed to Jaworski. "Why did this happen here in St. Louis?" Fraley said. "There was an instant clarity of purpose due to Ernie's vision and leadership."
Jaworski deflects praise for the final result. He credits former chairman John Hanley with giving a "maverick" scientist the chance to explore topics outside the corporate comfort zone and for pointing Monsanto down a non-traditional research path.
He credits former chairman Richard Mahoney with making the huge investment in research. And he praises the late Howard Schneiderman, who, as senior vice president for research and development, was the driving scientific force in Monsanto's transformation.
"Most embryonic ideas need champions," said Jaworski, "and I got the support I needed." |
