March 2018 Monsanto announced their purchase of a little known, but cutting edge CRISPR based gene editing company called Pairwise for $125 million. Why would a company long known for their dominance of DNA manipulation and market cornering food construction suddenly shift gears to the emerging gene isolation and splicing world only to be swallowed up by the German pharmaceutical power house Bayer in June of that same year? To get to the bottom of the implications and strategies of these two events is complex, and ultimately, hinges on a rumor that percolated through the science community that has implications well beyond commerce, drugs, and food production.
Monsanto began as an American agrochemical and agricultural corporation started in 1901 as a chemical company. The founder was John Francis Queeny, a 30 year veteran of the nascent pharmaceutical industry. He funded the firm with his own money and, capital from a soft drink distributor. He and his crew of scientists created Saccharin and other artificial food additives still in use today. Monsanto had a history of thumbing its nose at needless regulation to hasten innovation and profit. Early in their history they founded their own town called Monsanto in Illinois (now known as Sauget). This allowed them to lower taxation and profit loss from regulation, which they pumped back into their company. During the Second World War many of Monsanto's science team aided the Manhattan project. After the war the company diversified the scope of their research field creating Polyurethane, DDT, PCB's and a laundry soap recipe they sold to Unilever called "ALL" which still exists today. DDT turned out to be chemically too good to be true and in 1972 was banned in the U.S. In 1977 Monsanto also found faults in another of their products; Polychlorinated biphenyl or (PCB) a wonder chemical for the control and regulation of heat transfer. PCB arguably saved as many lives as it took. Despite its many applications, continued research showed that it not only broke down but, eroded parts of the atmosphere when it did in aerosol form. Monsanto voluntarily stopped producing PCB's in 1977. Two years later the U.S. government banned PCB's outright. That same decade Monsanto helped pioneer compound synthetization which aided in treatments for diseases like Parkinson's disease. From about 1960 to 1980 Monsanto's scientists created a best/worst of list for bio chemicals and other inventions, L.E.D's, and Agent Orange being the most notable.
Somewhere around 1983 a curious thing happened that would dictate the course of genetic evolution for all time. Under the direction of new CEO Richard Mahoney, Monsanto's research and development department started working on the fledgling science of DNA manipulation. In 1988, Monsanto published their first scientific results in regard to plant based genetic manipulation conducted in the field with live plants. The growth and yield results were fantastic and buried anything the still perpetual enemy of all free peoples the USSR had ever dreamed possible.
From there the early vision of the company collapsed. The mission of the company changed and the research became ever more focused on short term profit. Monsanto went from a greatest generation, futurist, forward thinking company to a Baby boomer, profit generating nightmare. The moment the very first GMO (as they would later be called) test plants in Monsanto's greenhouses went from fruit, to seed, Monsanto's botanists knew that Pandora's Box had been unlocked. The dream of farmers as far back as the Babylonians and later, the Aztecs, who first bred maize from the size of a pinky finger to the size of a human foot, had finally been unlocked. What took generations could now be done in months. Food stability and production is what societies are made of. Without the comfort of a full belly there would be no reason to work alongside those who might take nourishment from you. The mutually created calories we get from working together allow humans time to contemplate art, love, philosophy and science. Monsanto had the keys to end hunger, famine and very likely, war. Sadly they also saw, and loved profit.
The Vietnam War was over. A cultural war had been fought at home and like all wars, someone lost. The beatniks and hippies, who preached individualism, free thinking, and love had failed. The leaders of the civil rights movement had been murdered leaving only Reagan's America and the culture of short sighted flags, walking tall and making love to greed. During this time of turmoil, there was among all the Monsanto execs and engineers a single genius whose name is forgotten to time. But the impact of their single vision will always be felt. The idea was simple enough. Instead of selling seeds that produce better crops that are impervious to drought, disease, pests while maximizing nutrition and taking minimal land to cultivate. Monsanto would focus on making powerful herbicide sprays that destroy all living organisms in soil with the exception of plants that have been modified to resist the herbicide that can only be produced by and purchased from Monsanto. The spray was called "Roundup" and the plants were called "Roundup Ready". "Round Up" as an herbicide is so successful that it not only kills all plant matter in the soil it also kills most of the microbes in the soil rendering the soil useless for growing anything. This is why Monsanto also offered special fertilizers that were also "Roundup Ready". Instead of selling a seed that creates hearty, drought, pest, and disease resistant plants. They would sell a plant that resists their spray. Roundup eliminates most of the Farmers' problems bringing a crop to market. Fungus, virus, invasive plants and other pests (including many animals) are all eliminated with two applications of spray in a single season. Not only is this system easier for the farmer, it's also cost effective by eliminating the need for crop rotation, constant pest management, purchasing several different products to manage numerous strains of weed and disease. Amongst many things this allows the farmer to eliminate, it also empowers them to have a smaller staff by eliminating regular manual jobs that come with organic or conventional farming techniques.
The 1980's were a terrible time for farmers. By the mid-80's, at least a third of Nebraska farmers, were in danger of losing their farms. Delinquency on property taxes increased nearly 400 percent between 1980 and 1985. During this period, banks in Nebraska were failing at rates that were the highest in the nation. Farmers couldn't pay back their loans; there were more bank failures than at any time since the Great Depression. By the end of the decade the family farm would be almost a thing of the past. The situation was so bad that famous patriots like Willie Nelson held charity concerts to help bail the farmers out and save the family farm. Monsanto took advantage of this government created calamity to sell their new and cheaper growing system. The Monsanto system spread and grew for good reason. Not only was Monsanto taking advantage of a rare economic opportunity, but the Roundup Ready system worked! Farmers had higher yields using less resources and overhead cost. These crops were also designed to ship and age better than heirloom or conventional crops. The FDA turned a blind eye to how the results were achieved. The blind eye also applied to the overall impact of Monsanto's practices. Monsanto's practices were largely ignored because, since 1947, the US and the USSR had been locked in a race not only to feed their own populations but feed the world as a vital lever of state craft. Much like ancient Egypt who grew almost all of Rome's wheat, the Americas rapidly became the world's bread bowl while the poor Soviets stood in line for basic food stuffs. So how did Monsanto do it?
Once, the idea of a genetic genome became manifest. It was clear that evolution took place on the molecular scale. Also clear was that the tools and tech existed to manipulate and control genetic engineering. The direct transfer of DNA from one organism to another was first accomplished by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in 1972. Until 2013, theirs was the only expression specific editing system for DNA. It is important to note that Boyer used this discovery to create synthetic insulin that saved millions of lives, while Cohen used it to develop strategies to fight cancer that are still used to this day. The system they forged is impossibly cleaver and a testament to the genius of the people who worked alongside them.
A modern Monsanto seed is designed by finding a genetic trait in one organism that you want to put in another. Once the useful trait from one organism is isolated using the Cohen/Boyer system it can be extracted, studied, and synthetically reengineered. This isolated piece of data is then forced into a genome by a "gene gun" that shoots metal particles coated with DNA into plant tissue with a .22-caliber charge. Geneticists would do this to several hundred plants and then wait to see which one would show the proper expressions during maturity. The best plants would then be bred to seed and mass produced. The end result was most of the food you have been eating since your childhood and continue to eat now has been created this way. There has been very little research to show that GMO's as a food source are a danger to the end user. They often don't taste as good as organic but biologically, there is nothing really wrong with them. What is a problem is how Monsanto has marketed and bullied farmers into using their products.
For over three decades the Boyer/Cohen system made Monsanto one of the largest, wealthiest and powerful companies off all time. There are many things that can be said about Monsanto's business practices and lack of transparency during these years. There is evidence of political bribery, fraud and abuse of farmers that is well documented and easily researched. Included is a lawsuit where Skagit Valley farmers sued Monsanto for spraying roundup over large swaths of Weyerhaeuser timber land that floated into and contaminated acres of organic farm land. I am glossing over much of this for now but, will likely touch back on it in future writings as Monsanto is a company that has committed crimes against many nations and most importantly against the American people. For the sake of this article I will focus on their research/development systems and the unexpected events made known to me that have taken place over several years. I do this because their shady business practices are well known. What can't be known are the secret findings of Monsanto's lab which are likely beyond anything else they have been accused of? I also feel pressure from my sources which are desperate to get the word out at great risk to themselves. Monsanto had been using the Boyer and Cohen system to great success for a few decades. Few if any companies could boast the level of sophistication and results that the scientists at Monsanto had achieved. Like any company they were always developing their systems. Being good capitalists they were obsessed with protecting their hard work from fraud or imitation.
At some point around 2015 Monsantos management, backed by their army of lawyers decided that they needed to find a way to circumvent patent paper laws and make a physical trademark for their product. By having a physical trade mark branded on their organisms they could use to seek legal prosecution against anyone who committed the sin of using their product without company expressed permission. The researchers tasked with this mission began with a focus around the M13 phage (phage being a virus that parasitizes a bacterium by infecting it and reproducing inside It.) this is the same cellular compartment that common viruses use to send a "copy me" message. Monsanto's gene editors first began by placing simple markers that would copy from plant to plant. This strategy would work well for short term crops. Typically the marker would reproduce true for maybe two generations out. Although easy and practical, this wasn't a long enough time line for Monsanto's lawyers' dream of an indefinet trademark. They wanted to make sure that the trademark would not just be maintained for several generations but also still carry true if the organism had been tinkered with on the DNA level. Current CEO Hugh Grant was looking even further down the road and understood that not only American companies, but foreign operators from China were driven to find a way to circumvent Monsanto's copyright protections and pervert their hard-earned research.
In the summer of 2015, Hugh ordered the top scientists of each genetic research department to be reassigned and condensed into a single research team dubbed "Legacy". Legacy's goal was to find a way to add long term trademark branding on the molecular level. Always forward-thinking, Monsanto was aiming for a way to leave a mark that wouldn't just be impervious to human intervention but genetically stable for hundreds of generations or more. The variables involved in writing, injecting and maintaining a distinct non mutating genetic code was a huge hurdle for Hughes's little group of scientists. Despite being given a single cause, the team was at a loss. There is no known way to stop evolution. The most basic building blocks of life are constantly in a struggle to reproduce, and, to meet those ends, they are always modifying and adapting in order to reproduce. Team Legacy delved deeply and whole heartedly into this project. Building a unique genetic code that would constitute a physical trademark wouldn't be hard. A couple of special made proteins that would take up minimal space would not be hard to produce. The challenge was finding how to not only place it where competitors couldn't find it but also how to place it where the code wouldn't evolve and corrode into something that wouldn't hold up in court. They spent months together in close quarters doing the sort of research that a college level geneticist would dream of. What they eventually found was an almost unbelievable constant that dwelled in a sea of genetic drift. While groping around a genome for somewhere to place a long strain pattern, a researcher came across a small bit of code that seemed to do nothing. The geneticist looked closer and found that they had misjudged this little protein strain. The strain did in fact do things. It sent and received a blank RNA chain. Back and forth it traveled a seemingly useless strand of RNA that marched through a very small space and returned. The code in the RNA was seemingly nonsense. Effectively, it sent very little and received nothing in return. The first member of Project Legacy who observed this exchange likely kept the observation to themselves and thought little about it. After further observation, the actions of this little molecule seemed pointless. But a common rule in science is that nothing in nature is pointless. Someone pondered the mystery code and decided there must be a why. They sat on this finding for several weeks before realizing they couldn't crack the code and pointed the anomaly to the rest of the team. Much to the surprise of the first legacy team member who spoke up about this little anomaly, some of their team didn't seem surprised by the findings. One or two members of the team had observed this benign place holder before but never looked further into it. All other avenues of Legacy's research came to a halt and the question of a seemingly empty place holder in Monsanto's test DNA became the main focus. After months of further inspection what the team found was that they had lost. The job of designing a permanent physical DNA trademark had already been done. Not only had someone else made the accomplishment, but it had likely taken place long before the first Terra primate had stood on two legs. The defeat became worse as the scientists rushed to check their findings against other genome mapped organisms. Not only did the mystery code exist in all of Monsanto's plants but all the other completely mapped organisms that they could find. Spooked, they ran isolated tests on some of their other modified seeds and watched dumbfounded as the seemingly benign, and pointless code replicated itself and passed from one sample to another. Shocked, the team began to debate amongst themselves what could possibly be going on and why. After a few sleepless nights, it was decided that the two project heads would go and report privately to Hugh Grant what they had found and what the team felt might be the explanation for it.
Mr. Grant must have known something had gone awry as it is not normal for researchers to ask for a private meeting. There would be no board members, assistants, lawyers or any of the usual corporate, royal court. What the two brave scientists brought to the meeting was enough questions and conjecture to end a massively successful company and possibly change the course of human history. The two scientists showed Mr. Grant examples of what they had found and offered the few explanations they had. What they could say, was that they had succeeded in finding a way to build a physical trademark that would pass from offspring and not corrupt over very long periods of time. What couldn't be easily explained was how they learned to make their trademark and who first designed the process before the team discovered it could even be done. Carefully the two team leaders explained that there was already a constant DNA sequence in everything. Every plant, animal, rock, and microbe had an identical bit of data that wasn't needed but was always constant. Hugh Grant of course asked for an explanation. He was given two answers based on Team Legacy's internal debates. One was that the rogue sequence was part of a universal mechanism that was beyond human understanding and might fit a purpose that humans werent yet prepared to understand. Amongst the team, this was the first argument hoisted. But if this idea were true, it wouldn't explain why the RNA exchange always kept the same pattern regardless of the organism being modified. It was argued that if the code had an unforeseen use it would either destroy part of the organism in a way that could be detected or the organism would show some other sign of it having been changed. Strangely that never happened regardless; of how many times the scientists tried rearranging or eliminating it. Each time the code was altered it would revert back to its original useless, yet constant, form. The second explanation was fantastical but from an Ockham's razor stand point, it could hold true. This train of thought implied that Team Legacy's trademark crusade had been beaten and not recently. The mystery code was likely a trademark that was so old that it had existed from the start. The implication was that all life on earth was designed and owned by a single entity. What they had found was possible proof that all life on our planet was the intellectual property of a race that was seemingly in the business of seeding organisms for profit from far away and then collecting the organically modified DNA. The tech that made this code would take thousands of years for humans to figure out. But, by finding it the way Monsanto did, the time line could be reduced to a couple of hundred years. The implications of proving that not just the human race but all life on earth began by a corporation of sorts were hard to fathom. Yet, here the proof was and what to do? Hugh Grant realized he had intergalactic insider information and by luck, he received that information hundreds of years before anyone else on earth had even thought to look for it. Grant had to realize that the ramification of all known life being the property of an unseen entity didnt matter. Even, if you consider the source of the code our creators or some sort of celestial parental figure. They would be distant parents at best, and not likely to check up on their investment/progeny anytime soon. Sadly, despite being one of the most important moments in human history it is hard to tell when exactly this meeting happened and what decisions were made.
What can be known is that somewhere around April 2016 there is a drastic change in Monsantos business practices and some strange choices made by Hugh Grant that indicate a shift of focus for Monsanto's business model. It is easily conceived that Hugh's first move would be to cover up Team Legacy's findings by temporarily stopping the project after forcing all involved to sign NDA's. Based on documented information, it would seem that Hugh decided to liquidate Monsanto to begin a covert research company and take the research team with him. The Legacy findings were technically the property of Monsanto. Luckily, no one but Hugh and a handful of scientists knew about the discovery. After silencing the scientists, the next step would be scrubbing the findings clean from any records from the project. The hard data and research notes would be easy enough to hide. But how to remove the molecular trail and keep others from finding it before Hugh could take advantage of his new-found insider information? Monsanto's genetic tools for decades had relied on the Boyer and Cohen gene editing system. These tools had produced wondrous results and Monsanto's team had become wizards at splicing DNA strands from different organisms together for very specific outcomes. What the Boyer and Cohen system could not do was physically, and permanently, erase the code in a way that wouldnt be detected later. It is important to remember that Hugh Grant is a very smart and capable capitalist. Surely he understood that he was sitting on a once in a life time discovery and that the applications from back engineering the discovery had potential to be one of the most useful and profitable technologies of all time. However, hiding the code was well beyond Monsanto' technical scope. Nearing retirement, it had to of occurred to him that using this new found tech to start his own company would not only make him wealthy beyond reason but also afford him a lasting project that would have real consequences for all mankind. Hugh was a substantialy wealthy man but starting such a project would take large a amount of capital. Raising the funds without explaining what the money was intended for would be difficult. His reputation was good but not good enough to solicit billions from investors with the explanation of "trust me". Getting the funding would be the easy part though. He was close enough to retirement that negotiating a sale of Monsanto wouldn't raise much scrutiny. The problem with just liquidating everything would be the implied inclusion of Monsanto's research data to whoever would be the new owner. The Legacy code was in every complete Genome that his company had developed. Fortunately, for Hugh another company had developed a way to cleanly cut strands of code from DNA on a massive scale.
In March of 2018 Monsanto announced its intention to fund and essentially buy a small gene editing company called "Pairwise". Pairwise used a Harvard gene editing technology called CRISPR or (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). Simply put the CRISPR system uses white blood cell enzyme defense technology (discovered by an Osaka University scientist around 1987) that literally cuts up DNA. Harvard Scientists used this discovery to develop a method of placing markers on two sides of a DNA strand and use what basically amounts to a virus to cut out strands from a genome. Once that strand is cut, scientists allow the DNA's natural defense to reattach what's left of the code. Pairwise had been using this gene splicing tech to start a grass roots movement which would eventually, compete directly against Monsanto. Here was a little up Start Company that could provide Hugh Grant with everything he needed. Not only would their splicing system offer the tools to scrub all of Monsanto's old genetic data of the Legacy code, but to the public it would offer the disguise of a big fish company swallowing a smaller one. The purchase could also be viewed as damage control on Monsanto's part. Gene splicing doesnt introduce foreign DNA into an organism. So it doesnt fall under most governments' definition of a genetically modified organism. The acquisition of Pairwise would seem like a logical move by a company with an image problem. Which in many ways it was, but to Hugh Grant it was also the garnishing of a tool to further the start of his new company. His true intentions couldn't be made known and didnt have to. The public view was that a genius business move had been made assuring Monsanto's dominance for years to come. What speculators didn't realize is that it also made Monsanto a much more marketable company to be sold on the open market.
Much to the surprise of the world's investor community, in June of 2018 Bayer (a German drug company) announced they would be purchasing Monsanto for $66 Billion dollars. This would make Bayer the world's largest maker of seeds and agricultural chemicals in the world. The timing of the purchase is interesting. Bayer chairman Werner Baumann announced the acquisition by stating "we will be even better placed to help the world's farmers grow healthy and affordable food in a sustainable manner" to make the purchase legal to the world regulatory body, Bayer had to sell off their very profitable plastics subdivision. They were also forced to sell $9 billion in assets to BASF. German based BASF is the largest chemical producer in the world. The sale forced Bayer to give up their field seeds as well as Bayer's vegetable-seeds business. It is interesting to note that all of these rapid and seemingly crazy transactions took place a few months after Legacy gave their report to Mr. Grant. It would seem that Monsanto's purchase of Pairwise wasnt as subtle as Grant had hoped. The purchase was likely viewed by outside players as being made out of haste. This likely tipped Hughes's hand more than he would have liked. Bayer saw this move for what it was and began a campaign of corporate spying and espionage. Lucky for Grant, whatever information Bayer was able to garnish wasn't complete enough to see the whole picture. Bayer's eventual purchase of Monsanto seemed, to everyone who wasn't Bayer, like any other company paying a lot of money for a robust, profitable company. What investors and pundits in the mainstream media didn't know was that Bayer made the purchase based on the perceived knowledge that Monsanto's scientists had found something new. It is certain Bayer misconstrued the Pairwise purchase as a corporation taking over a competitor to gain more scientists who were expert with an emerging technology. Grants only advantage against whatever leaks Bayer had disclosed was that he had bought Pairwise to destroy and not expand research. What Hugh's didn't know is that Someone loosely connected to Legacy had leaked information and Bayer subsequently jumped on the info thinking they had gotten an advantage, when in reality they had gained little. Bayer's perspective was that they were buying mysterious, advanced, DNA information as well as some of the best CRISPR scientists in the world. Unbeknownst to Bayer, before the Pairwise purchase Grant took a handful of his newly acquired research company scientists and invited them to an off campus meeting. After introductions they were asked to sign NDA's. The rest of the meeting was spent introducing the new team members into some of the mysteries of team Legacy and explaining their covert job. The rookies were told that their new task was to help teach the senior members of Legacy to scrub a single line of useless code from all of Monsanto's complete genomes utilizing the CRISPR tech. Between March and June of 2018, the newly expanded team Legacy were using CRISPR tech to cut out what might very well be alien DNA from Monsanto's entire collection of Genomes.
By the end of June 2018 Hugh Grant had sold Monsanto to Bayer for $66 billion dollars. Hugh himself would walk away with almost $123 million in liquid untraceable cash. Many finance experts and pundits felt that Grant could have gotten more. Initially Bayer offered $70 billion and even that number seemed like a low ball pitch for a company as large and stable as Monsanto. It can also be noted that Bayer gave up a lot of its revenue stream to make the purchase. Thanks to NWO business hating, regulatory bodies. Bayer was forced to strip away parts of its company to make the purchase "legal". It is worth noting that in 2008, Grant was named one of the world's 30 most respected CEOs on the Barron.com annual top CEO list. He was named 2010 CEO of the Year by Chief Executive Magazine. Also of note is that a number of Monsanto's upper level officials also resigned after the merger and much like Mr. Hughes seem to be doing nothing of public note after the sale. These aren't typical behaviors for powerful people with careers making a straight forward merger. By time Papers were signed and the sale of Monsanto to Bayer was made public, Team Legacies cover up had long been completed and the small group of Geneticists had already begun the process of moving into new quarters. The new facility and all of its equipment had been paid for by Hugh Grant without public scrutiny. The billions he personally made from the Monsanto sale would allow him to build, furnish and maintain a covert, state of the art genetics lab. The aims, goals, and trajectory of this new lab are almost impossible to know. What's obvious is that Grants post Monsanto silence speaks volumes.
-- Arthur B. Alexi