Researcher Tonyja Liles peers through a gel containing Arabidopsis plants in Monsanto’s futuristic lab and automated greenhouse in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Arabidopsis is the lab rat of modern plant breeders because of its simple, fully sequenced genome. Corn’s genome is 19 times larger, while wheat’s is 128 times larger—5 times larger than Homo sapiens’. The chemical and seed giant Monsanto, founded in 1901, was the first to create blockbuster genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for farmers—corn, soybean, and cotton varieties that were resistant to Monsanto’s widely used herbicide Roundup and carried the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacteria that was lethal to several crop pests. Although the new crops saved farmers time, fuel, and soil, they unleashed a global backlash against the technology, which some opponents labeled “frankenfood.” Monsanto’s GMOs have lost some of their luster as Roundup-resistant weeds and Bt-resistant bugs are once again plaguing farmers’ fields. In 2018, the company was acquired by Bayer AG and the name Monsanto was retired. Though GMOs are deemed safe by the US Food and Drug Administration, they are banned in most of Europe, Russia, and Africa. But the challenges to twenty-first-century agriculture are so great, researchers are loathe to throw out any tool, and many hold out hope for the next generation of GMOs.
