It’s a corporation. It’s goal is not to further science, but to make a profit. They use science as a means to an end.
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If Monsanto is science, then isn’t it “bad” or “junk” or “pseudo” science? Good science would consist of asking mother nature the right questions and respecting the answers. Bad science might be blindly pursuing some executive bullet point with bioengineering and other science-backed processes without actually engaging fully in the full scientific meaning, consequence, and harm of what their latest crash development program might create.
In other words, I don’t believe the harm to surface waters, soil, the progeny of herbicide-resistant weeds, or the toxic harm to honeybees, monarch butterflies, and bats would result if industrial agriculture were truly scientific. They aren’t. They are “science-y” in the “truthiness” sense of meaning. I fear the truth of the situation is closer to: they distort scientific truth through myopic lenses applied in the wrongful pursuit of their agenda, creating great environmental harm, and doubtless other forms of harm, including economic and monopolistic. They are irrational in the pursuit of profits, which is why the agriculture they create is unsustainable, environmentally harmful, and likely toxic to its consumers.
At best, Monsanto does “real” unethical science, based on the harmful real-world outcomes they’re creating with it. I personally would argue that “real science” and “harmful results” are mutually-exclusive, and so what they are doing is by definition “not science or scientific” any more than a tobacco company developing a new “rational” argument for why smoking does not cause cancer.
Monsanto is full to the brim with good scientists - microbiologists, biochemists, plant pathologists, entomologists, you name it - doing real science. To create the products they create they need to further understand of plants and insects, the methods they use are the same methods all scientists use, and many of the people engaged in the work are driven not only by the desire to put food on the table but also by curiosity (just as academic scientists are driven not only by curiosity but also by a need to put food on the table).
You might not like some of the products the company produces, but for many big ag companies are scientists doing science is the essence of what they do, and Monsanto is one of the most sciencey of these companies.
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The key word there is “started”.
Right, but “started” is all that’s relevant to the specific argument that I’m making. If Obama and Clinton weren’t Reaganite neoliberals and were really cunning cryptosocialists, then they presumably could have loaded up the first two years of each of their terms with super liberal legislation and ram it through – you know, the way Reagan and Bush did during their terms for “conservative” legislation.
But they didn’t, providing some degree of evidence that they are actually the same sort of centrist neoliberals I suspect them to be.
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That’s pretty much the definition of engineering, aka applied science. Any serendipitous discoveries along the way are just a bonus.
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Do you think the two are mutually exclusive? I never suggested it was. While the products might be a boon to humanity, they aren’t doing it for that purpose. They are engaged in a for-profit venture, and while that doesn’t mean that they won’t do good things, too, it’s not their purpose as a company. I have no problem with the scientists working for them, but that doesn’t mean we should accept everything Monsanto as a company does at face value. No corporations should get a pass just because they are doing work that many of us think is good or useful.
But they are not doing it for engineering. They are a for-profit corporation. That doesn’t mean that they can’t produce good science, but that their goal is not the promotion of science, but of the corporate bottom line. Again, not mutually exclusive here.
I never said we should take everything they say at face value; I was just explaining my response to your first post (“Since when is Monsanto science?”). Quite a lot of good and important science has taken place in corporate labs, including both “big ag” and “big pharma” (not to mention “big phone” aka Bell Labs), and much or all of that was profit-driven.
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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.
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It would be nice to have venues like Bell Labs again, though, wouldn’t it? That truly was a wonderland: here’s all the money and supplies you need, have fun, let us know if you come up with anything useful but we won’t fire you if you don’t. The golden age of R&D.
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