I sense we’re agreeing here but to be sure I’ll clarify what I said earlier. Bear in mind, I’m writing this for the general reader as well, so some of my points may be redundant to you.
Monsanto is a for-profit corporation that makes their profits through bioengineering. Like any other company whose bread-and-butter is engineering, Monsanto relies on peer-reviewed academic research related to its particular field—in their case, biochemistry, genetics, botany, agriculture, etc. This may be theoretical (research investigating hypotheses generated by current working models) applied research (translating findings into technological advances), and anything else that defines, focuses, or furthers their objectives.
The form of the above paragraph could be adapted to any other for-profit corporation relying on such research, be it Boeing, Google, Lockheed-Martin, or AstraZeneca. Drug development is a particularly cross-disciplinary enterprise, so pharma corporations like AstraZeneca will be pulling from not just chemistry literature but also those of neuroscience, medicine, and psychology.
All of which is to say: engineering is how they make their profits and increase their share value. They’re not ‘doing it for engineering’, they are engineering.
None of this mental brawn, of course, automatically grants a corporation a moral compass.
