Features

The tangled ties between UC Berkeley and the agro-chemo-pharmaceutical industry grew gnarlier this week, with GMO and herbicide giant Monsanto thrown into the equation. 

Mendel Technology, founded by Chris Somerville, announced Monday a partnership with Monsanto to develop fuels from miscanthus—the same crop that is the target of much of the research of the Energy Bioscience Institute (EBI), the campus-based program funded with $500 million from British oil giant BP plc. 

Somerville, who heads the EBI, no longer holds a management position with Mendel.  

Miscanthus is a relative of sugar cane and produces tall stalks that Berkeley researchers hope to break down into fuel components with genetically altered microbes. 

EBI researchers hope to convert cellulose into fuel, a process that is now both difficult and costly. Researchers have talked of genetically tweaking microbes harvested from termite guts, which break down wood fibers swallowed by the voracious insects. 

Somerville was recruited from Stanford and the Carnegie Institute to run the EBI, a program administered by the university and partnering with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

The second major fuel crop program administered by the university is headed by another UC Berkeley scientist, Jay Keasling, whose own private company just announced last a commercial sugar-cane-to-fuel program in partnership with a leading Brazilian ethanol producer. 

Critics of the UC Berkeley agrofuel programs have consistently charged that privatization of academic research will have adverse impacts on Third World countries, where patented crops have spurred massive protests and, in India, suicides. 

Monsanto is one of the leading targets of protests, in part because it owns both the pesticide Roundup and genetically altered crops engineered to resist the pesticide—forcing farmers to buy both seeds and chemicals from the same company. 

Mendel has also developed strains of soy for Monsanto, and the company has also partnered with Bayer CropScience to research the ways plants respond to Bayer chemicals. 

Last June, the company announced it was partnering with EBI sponsor BP to collaborate on developing crops, dubbed feedstocks, suitable for fuel production. 

That announcement came less than three months after Mendel acquired the world’s largest collection of germ plasm for miscanthus, the subject of both this week’s announced Monsanto partnership and efforts of the BP-funded EBI program. 

Monsanto and Mendel have had a long-term relationship, according to the company’s press releases, and signed a five-year agreement in 2006 for the agro-giant to develop the fruits of Mendel’s research.