Ghost Credits | Academia's Hidden Industry Ties - Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities

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Our risk perception is not very scientific. In fact, it's not rational, it's not quantitative. We are disproportionately fearful of things that are new, that we don't understand, that we can't control, and about which there is uncertainty. And I think that a lot of the claimed risks of GMOs that the public is concerned about are simply falsehoods that have been propagated.
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You wouldn't know it from his speeches, but Bruce Chassis was not independent. He was working with Monsanto, a major producer of GMOs and herbicides. And he wasn't alone. Several other academics were doing the exact same thing, defending GMOs in public while quietly collaborating with the company that made them professors.
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And academics really have the trust of the public. So Monsanto used academics to carry the messaging for them.
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Margo Gray. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files how one of the most powerful companies in agriculture recruited academics into its PR war. Tom Philpott has covered food and agriculture policy for almost two decades. He's seen a lot change in that time. But one thing has stayed the same. One company has dominated what American Farmers Monsanto.
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By 2005, when I started writing about this stuff, Monsanto is already dominating the seed industry. And my very first blog post was about their market power.
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Monsanto's market power is even more impressive when you look at the company's origins. Monsanto didn't start as an agriculture company. It started as a chemical producer.
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Next time you fly, look around you. You'll see many ways Monsanto made your trip a little bit better. The luxurious carpeting of Acrilan acrylic. The tables made of Monsanto plastics. The dessert cakes made light and fluffy. Thanks to Monsanto Food Research,
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Monsanto made a lot of chemicals that were very good for business and very bad for people. One of those was the chemical known as PCBs.
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PCBs are sort of the forever chemicals of mid century America. Their harms were very, very apparent early on, and the company kept marketing them well after they knew how damaging they were.
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PCBs were eventually banned by the US government, and that meant Monsanto had to figure out what came next. The company pivoted in a big way to agriculture. One of its chemists developed a new chemical, glyphosate. It was extremely effective at killing weeds. And in the 1970s, Monsanto began selling it under the brand name Roundup.
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Roundup Herbicide by Monsanto. There's never been a herbicide like it before. Roundup controls many of the toughest grasses and weeds, including their.
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Sales of Roundup were strong. But like other herbicides on the market, it had a limitation. Once crops sprouted, Roundup didn't just kill the weeds, it killed the crops too. So farmers could only spray it at certain times of the year until Monsanto changed the equation. In the early 1980s, company scientists genetically modified seeds to tolerate glyphosate, the active ingredient in roundup. And by 1996, Roundup Ready seeds were on the market. Now farmers could spray their seeds whenever they needed to. The chemical would kill the weeds, but not the crops. It was a game changer.
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They knew that they had a blockbuster. If they could make this thing work, they would sell loads and loads of glyphosate. They knew that they were looking at billions and billions of dollars in Profits.
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There was just one problem, a big one. Almost immediately, there were safety concerns. Animals exposed to glyphosate were developing tumors. And studies in the Midwest pointed to higher cancer rates among farmers who used Roundup heavily. This was the last thing Monsanto needed.
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You're talking about a company that has lost a certain amount of public trust from its experiences in PCBs. So the company has a tarnished reputation. And it becomes really important, important to establish glyphosate as absolutely harmless.
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That wasn't going to be easy. If Monsanto said the product was safe, people weren't just going to take their word for it. Not the public, not regulators. They needed someone else to say it. Preferably scientists, scientists who looked independent. And Monsanto worked to make that happen.
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So a study comes out in 2000 by these three ostensibly independent researchers, researchers of good reputation who claimed to look at all the data and look at all the studies and concluded that it was not at, you know, any kind of human threat.
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The paper looked great for Monsanto. Independent scientists concluding that glyphosate posed no cancer risk and no reproductive harm for humans. The thing is, these scientists weren't exactly operating independently. Behind the scenes, Monsanto employees were actually running the study. We know this because of emails that later became public.
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In this incredible 2000 email from this executive to a bunch of other Monsanto employees, she praises her colleagues for their hard work over three years at data collection, writing, review and relationship building with the paper's authors. And so it ends up being a paper that is ghost written by Monsanto.
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But at the time, no one realized this. So the paper was a massive success. It ended up in the top 1/10 of 1% of the most cited glyphosate studies in academic literature. And it became a key piece of evidence for regulators around the world. What would you say was Monsanto's takeaway from organizing this study?
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It was this very successful operation that we can speculate, caused them to think, hmm, what else could we do with professors? What other ways could we sort of collaborate with professors to our benefit?
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Over the coming years, Monsanto would find plenty of ways to collaborate with academics to do that. I'm Hannah.
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Roundup poses no risk to human health or safety. That was the conclusion of a major study published in 2000, supposedly written by three independent experts. What no one knew at the time was that the project had actually begun inside Monsanto's own headquarters. So the public listened, and for a while, calls to regulate Roundup quieted. But they didn't disappear. By the 2000 and tens, Americans were becoming more aware that a lot of their food supply relied on genetically engineered crops GMOs, and that those crops were often sprayed with herbicides. Like Roundup, Concern started to build, and in 2012 it boiled over in California, where grassroots activists pushed for mandatory GMO labeling.
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It was really a low bar. Ask Europe has labeled genetically engineered foods for 20 years. It's common in many other countries, but we haven't been able to get it done here.
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This is Stacey Malkin. She founded a nonprofit watchdog group called us right to know. In 2012, she helped lead the campaign to label GMOs in California. It wasn't easy. Getting an issue on the ballot in California is notoriously difficult, but this movement had real grassroots support.
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It's just, you know, moms on the street petitioning to get that issue on the ballot. Massive volunteer effort People were volunteering full time like it was a job and really just made it unstoppable that this was going to be voted on by California voters.
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She was right. The petition qualified for the ballot comfortably with nearly a million signatures. And going into the election, the campaign looks strong. Polling showed consistent 65% support. Even celebrities got involved. Danny DeVito, Caitlin Olson, Bill Maher. They cut an ad.
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Here in America, you don't get the right to know if you're eating genetically
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modified organisms unless, unless, unless, unless you demand it. Unless you demand that GMOs get labeled. Vote yes on Prop 37. Polling looks strong until October 1st. That's when Monsanto launched an aggressive countercampaign. They spent roughly a million dollars a day on ads. But the opposition didn't seem to be coming from Monsanto alone.
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The astonishing thing about it was that so many seemingly independent third parties were using Monsanto's talking points. And that included professors who were constantly quoted in the press arguing against GMO labeling that GMOs are safe, pesticides are safe, ultra processed foods are safe, we don't need to worry. Anyone who's saying we need to worry not to be trusted. And it was over and over in many different forums.
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Their quotes were everywhere, in newspapers, on tv, on the radio. And in the month leading up to the election, Stacy says things started to unravel. The activists weren't the ones driving the conversation anymore.
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And then the public support tanked like a rock.
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On election day, Prop 37 lost. Monsanto won.
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So after that experience, we just really wanted to know how did they do this? Specifically, how did they have so many independent professors, Nobel laureate scientists, speaking the exact same language as the Monsanto led corporate campaign that convinced people to vote against a simple label?
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Stacy and her colleagues at US Right to Know suspected some of these professors had ties to Monsanto, but they couldn't prove it. So they got creative. When someone works at a public university, their emails are public record. So Stacy filed records requests.
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It is a long and tedious process that involves sometimes battling with universities, sometimes having to pay fees, many times having to file lawsuits to get documents, and then reading through them. We've gotten hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.
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Many of the documents involved a professor at the University of Florida, Kevin Folta. He ran the plant science department there. Stacy had always been suspicious about his relationship with Monsanto, though Kevin Folta strongly
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denied it multiple times. Said he was completely independent of industry and never took any money from industry. And then among the documents we found A proposal that he had submitted to Monsanto for a certain amount of money in exchange for doing public relations on biotech, promoting GMOs and biotech.
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On this occasion, Monsanto agreed to give Kevin Folta an unrestricted grant of $25,000, meaning there were no formal limits on how the money could be used. Folter responded to the acceptance letter by saying, I'm grateful for this opportunity and promise a solid return on the investment. Another academic Stacy had been suspicious about was Bruce Chassis, a professor at the University of Illinois. Like Volta, Chassis regularly said that he didn't receive funding from industry, and we
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found millions of dollars of payments to his university and payments to the professor himself from Monsanto. So really in an unraveling process, because the more you read, the more you start to see patterns about who's talking to who and where the connections are so that you can go back with more requests to go deeper.
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Eventually, Stacy had gathered enough documents to share some of them with the New York Times. And in 2015, the paper put the story on its front page. The headline read, food Industry Enlisted Academics in GMO Lobbying War. Email Show. Once the story broke, Stacy released the full batch of emails to the public. And that's when Tom Philpott, the journalist we heard from earlier, began combing through them. Though at first he was hesitant.
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It is intrusive for academics to get their email subpoenaed like that. So I was a little bit queasy to do it myself. But retrospectively, us right to know was exactly right to do it because there was so much going on under the radar that we had no idea of.
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Tom went through a mountain of emails, and when he finished, he was floored. He told me he thought the New York Times might have actually underplayed just how methodical Monsanto was about leveraging academic credibility. Tell us about the email where the Monsanto executive sent professors kind of detailed proposals for policy briefs.
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So this guy, Eric Sachs, who is Monsanto's strategic engagement lead, and in this particular project, he was the assignment editor and telling them, hey, here's some topics that you should consider writing about.
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So if I'm playing devil's advocate here for a second, what is so wrong about that? If academics believe what they're writing, what is so wrong about taking a prompt suggestion from Eric Sachs and turning it into a policy brief?
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My response to that would be the lack of disclosure. Professors are allowed to take public stances on, you know, especially on areas that are within their field, where the public trust gets a Little bit violated is when they don't disclose that they're working with the companies.
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The academics didn't just forget to disclose they were working with Monsanto. The email showed that Monsanto was actually helping them hide the connection.
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All through this correspondence there's this tone of, we know that you have to protect your independence. We know that you can't be seen as being associated with us.
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And Monsanto followed through. The policy briefs were repackaged into OP eds and blog posts published under the names of the academics. Monsanto's name was nowhere on them, just credible sounding experts sharing their views. And this was just one of many jobs that Eric Sachs had for his academics, another big one responding to critical press coverage.
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So he says there's been a piece published in Huffington Post. Can someone please go comment? Yeah, that was just hilarious. He felt empowered to do that. And he was right that they all enthusiastically took up the bait.
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There was also the time a Monsanto executive asked Kevin Folta to submit a blog post to WebMD on the safety and health of biotechnology. He wrote to Folta, over the past six months, we've worked hard through third parties to insert fresh and current material on WebMD's website.
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You know, I think this is just sort of like a measure of the sophistication of their strategy because this was a trusted source on medical advice and they wanted to make sure that they had trusted academics using their prestige to get in there and sort of inject themselves into the bloodstream. The consumer might say, oh yeah, should I Be concerned about GMOs and health? Let me Google that. And you get this WebMD page. And ideally for them, you've got Kevin Folta assuring you that everything is fine.
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Monsanto also lined up speaking engagements for its academic allies, including overseas. In one email, Bruce Chassis, the University of Illinois professor, agreed to travel to China. Without knowing the purpose of the trip. He wrote to Monsanto, where am I speaking to whom? For how long? More importantly, what is the topic and is there an assigned title?
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All of that was hilarious and satisfying and I think just so illuminating as to how deep, deeply these academics fell under the spell of this company.
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But maybe the most significant role these academics played was when it came to regulation. In 2011, the EPA was weighing a rule that would have forced companies like Monsanto to hand over much more of its safety and environmental data. Monsanto wasn't going to let that happen. They quietly helped to organize a meeting between EPA officials and two industry friendly academics, Bruce Chassis and Nina Fedoroff. A former professor at Penn State.
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She's very well respected. She had worked in the state departments of two different presidents, one Republican, one Democrat. So when she goes in there with Bruce Chassis and makes a case for light regulation, it obviously carries some weight.
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After meeting with the epa, Bruce Chassis reported back to Monsanto that the meeting had been very surprisingly productive. Ultimately, the regulation never passed. We can't say exactly what role that meeting played, but we do know this Academics were helping Monsanto make its case. And it wasn't just individual professors. Universities were part of the picture too.
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Monsanto and its academic allies had a pretty good thing going. Both sides benefited. Professors received funding for their labs and for travel. They got speaking invitations, press coverage, a wider audience for their research. And Monsanto. Monsanto got something it couldn't manufacture in house credibility. Independent seeming experts who could step in to defend its herbicides when a bad headline hit or when regulators started circling. But the relationship extended beyond a handful of professors. Monsanto also built ties with universities themselves. In one academic year, Monsanto gave the University of Florida a million dollar grant. Another year, Monsanto gave the University of Illinois a million dollar pledge to renovate one of its teaching labs. It is common for companies to donate to universities, but these weren't small checks. These were major institutional investments. So I understand how Monsanto benefited from giving money to the individual academics. They speak at conferences, they respond to negative media coverage, they write WebMD posts. But how does Monsanto benefit from giving that much money to a university?
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It's unclear what they gain specifically because the universities don't have to tell us.
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This is Stacy Malkin, who we heard from earlier.
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But there could be many benefits from corporate giving to universities. Yeah, it makes them look good. It makes them look like good citizens.
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Stacy says Monsanto didn't just get goodwill from donating to universities. The company got influence over research not by changing research results, but by shaping what questions got studied in the first place. And that matters because the questions scientists choose to ask determine the body of knowledge that follows. Stacy says you can see that dynamic in the debate over why bees are dying. There's been strong evidence that certain pesticides can harm bee populations. But most of the industry funded research focuses on other culprits.
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The industry's focus is to conduct studies about other things, like everything else besides pesticides, like the impact of mites, the impact of climate, whatever it may be, and diminish the focus on pesticides.
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Donating to universities brought another benefit too. It gave Monsanto a foothold on campus. At the University of Florida and at UC Davis, the company helped to organize conferences. Though its involvement wasn't publicized anywhere, they were attended by scientists and journalists. The focus was learning how to communicate modern biotechnology to the public in a way that felt accessible. Which sounds harmless enough, but according to Stacey, these conferences were really doing something else.
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They would bring together young scientists and journalists to these events and do the dog and pony show about how to promote GMOs and pesticides, why they're safe. And the funding of this was misrepresented to the people who attended. Organizers said it was a combination of government funding and university funding and industry funding. But actually the funding was straight up industry.
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The funding can be hard to trace because universities have different channels they can route donations through.
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Many universities set up these private foundations, which are themselves 501c3 nonprofits. And nonprofit entities are not required to publicly disclose who funds them. University of Florida foundation, for example, takes grant money from Monsanto, Bayer DuPont Pioneer and doesn't disclose it. So it's really important what students in universities do to demand transparency from their universities to ask who did the research, who paid for the research? What is the story they're trying to tell?
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That's the kind of scrutiny that recently led to a setback for monsanto. Remember the 2000 study, the one that concluded glyphosate was safe for humans? It appeared to have been written by independent experts, but it was later revealed to have been ghostwritten by Monsanto. And in December 2025, the publisher officially retracted it. 25 years later, I wanted to understand what that actually means. Does a retraction this far down the line change anything? So I called someone who's been tracking this study from the beginning, Investigative Journal journalist Carrie Gillom.
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The retraction, 25 years after the publication means a lot to a very small group of players. I don't think the damage, the misinformation that has been spread for 25 years, that is filtered down into regulatory decisions and market decisions and ultimately consumer and other user decisions about that definitely can't be undone, that can't be taken back.
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And that's part of what made Monsanto's playbook so powerful. Attach scientific credibility to acclaim, and it can shape public understanding for decades, even when new evidence complicates the picture. But Carrie reminded me of something. This strategy predates Monsanto.
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The tobacco industry was sort of where the playbook originated, but it has been adopted by oil and gas and pharmaceuticals and clearly chemical and the agrochemical industry. I think many people believe, and I probably do, too, although I don't have as much experience with those other industries, that maybe Monsanto was the big daddy of it. Like, they perfected it. This was in their DNA. This was in everything they did.
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Eventually, the strategy caught up with Monsanto. Starting in 2018, the company went to trial for a series of lawsuits over Roundup. One of those lawsuits was filed by a California school groundskeeper. He argued that Roundup had given him cancer and that Monsanto had manipulated science and intentionally misled the public all along.
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This is a case that I covered really, really closely. There was one judge in the litigation who started out pretty skeptical of the claims against Monsanto. And after the evidence had been laid out about using all these third parties, using these academics, creating all of these sort of narratives that were supposedly independent but were really created by Monsanto and carried forward by academics and others, the judge comes out, and he was just outraged and paraphrasing. But his message was, if you had spent just half as much time, half as much money on making sure you had a safe product as you did on putting forth all of these engineered false narratives, you wouldn't be in this situation today being sued by over 100,000 people.
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All told, Monsanto's parent company has now faced Ra roughly $14 billion related to Roundup cancer lawsuits. And the litigation still isn't fully over. If you've got a story idea, we would love to hear about it. Send us an email@campusfilespodmail.com and if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode while you're there. Leave us a review and a five star rating. Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast hosted by Margot Gray and Ian Mond. Our executive producers are Leah Rees Dennis and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont and Margot Gray, sound design and engineering by Andy Jaskowitz and Zach Clark, legal support by Living, Laura Berman and Melissa Jean. Original music by Davy Sumner. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Rose, Sean Cherry, Kurt Courtney and Lauren Vieira.
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Summary6 min read

Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
Episode: Ghost Credits | Academia's Hidden Industry Ties
Air Date: August 5, 2026
Host: Margo Gray

Overview

This episode explores the shadowy relationships between powerful corporations—in particular, Monsanto—and American universities, revealing how academic credibility can be leveraged to shape public policy, influence regulation, and alter public perception of controversial products like GMOs and herbicides. Through in-depth reporting and interviews with journalists, activists, and researchers, the episode uncovers the extent to which corporate interests quietly shape scientific discourse and university research using funding, ghostwriting, and strategic partnerships.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Monsanto’s Early Academic Ties and Ghostwriting Scandal

[00:00-08:39]

Bruce Chassy, a respected food scientist, was a vocal defender of GMOs and herbicides, not disclosing close ties and financial relationships with Monsanto.
Monsanto systematically recruited academics to function as public spokespersons, providing a trustworthy face to disputes about GMO and pesticide safety.
Tom Philpott (food/agriculture journalist): "By 2005...Monsanto is already dominating the seed industry." [03:31]
Monsanto’s ghostwriting: Studies appearing in leading journals were covertly shaped or outright written by company employees, most notably a 2000 "independent" paper concluding that glyphosate was not a human health risk.
- Philpott: “We know this because of emails that later became public. It ends up being a paper that is ghost-written by Monsanto.” [07:17]

2. The Battle Over GMO Labeling in California

[10:26-14:03]

By the 2010s, concern about GMOs and herbicides grew among the American public.
California’s Prop 37, mandating GMO labeling, gained ground with massive volunteer grassroots push.
- Stacy Malkin (US Right to Know): “It wasn’t easy...but this movement had real grassroots support.” [11:25]
Monsanto’s counter-campaign: Launched ads and deployed academic voices in media, mirroring corporate talking points while presenting as independent experts.
- “So many seemingly independent third parties were using Monsanto’s talking points, including professors...” [12:50]
Public support for labeling eroded as the media was saturated with these expert opinions, and Prop 37 ultimately failed.

3. Uncovering the Network: Public Records and Academic Payments

[14:03-16:10]

Activists, led by Stacy Malkin, used public records requests to acquire thousands of internal emails from public university professors.
Kevin Folta (University of Florida) and Bruce Chassy (University of Illinois) were shown to have deep financial and strategic ties with Monsanto, despite public denials.
- Malkin: "He’d said he was independent... then among the documents we found a proposal that he had submitted to Monsanto for a certain amount of money in exchange for doing public relations on biotech." [14:53]
- Evidence of substantial direct payments and project grants in exchange for active biotech promotion emerged.

4. Monsanto’s Playbook: Shaping Research, Media, and Regulation

[16:10-21:22]

Thousands of pages of emails documented Monsanto's active role in shaping the narrative—directly editing policy briefs, crafting op-eds, and coordinating public responses to criticism.
Tom Philpott: “Where the public trust gets a little bit violated is when they don’t disclose that they’re working with the companies.” [17:46]
Monsanto coached academics to conceal their relationships, maintaining the illusion of independence.
Academics, including Chassy and Nina Fedoroff, were used to influence regulatory conversations, even meeting behind closed doors with EPA officials to argue for lighter regulation of industry products.
- “She goes in there with Bruce Chassy and makes a case for light regulation—it obviously carries some weight.” [21:04] (Philpott)

5. University-Wide Corporate Influence

[22:59-26:23]

Monsanto provided large grants to universities (e.g., $1 million to University of Florida), securing influence at the institutional level.
“It’s unclear what they gain specifically because the universities don’t have to tell us... but there could be many benefits from corporate giving.” [24:21] (Malkin)
Corporate sponsorship influenced not just research outcomes but the questions asked, often deflecting attention away from critical issues (e.g., pesticides and bee decline).
- Margo Gray: “The questions scientists choose to ask determine the body of knowledge that follows.” [24:33]
Industry funding of campus conferences and training workshops was often misrepresented as originating from mixed public and private sources while entirely corporate in reality.

6. The Long-Term Impact and Retraction of Ghostwritten Science

[27:09-30:24]

In December 2025, the publisher formally retracted the influential 2000 glyphosate study, confirming Monsanto’s hidden role.
- Carrie Gillom (investigative journalist): “The retraction, 25 years after publication, means a lot to a small group of players... the misinformation... can’t be undone, that can’t be taken back.” [27:47]
The “playbook” of coopting credible voices originated with tobacco but was perfected by Monsanto and adopted by other industries.
- Gillom: “Tobacco... was where the playbook originated... but maybe Monsanto was the big daddy of it. Like, they perfected it... This was in their DNA.” [28:34]
Legal and financial reckoning: As of 2026, Monsanto’s parent company has faced approximately $14 billion in liabilities from Roundup-related lawsuits, with the litigation ongoing.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Bruce Chassy (in public speech defending GMOs):
- "Our risk perception is not very scientific... a lot of the claimed risks of GMOs that the public is concerned about are simply falsehoods that have been propagated." [01:59]
Tom Philpott (on Monsanto’s ghostwriting):
- "It is intrusive for academics to get their email subpoenaed like that... but retrospectively, US Right to Know was exactly right to do it because there was so much going on under the radar." [16:39]
Monsanto executive email (via Philpott):
- "There’s this tone of, we know that you have to protect your independence. We know that you can’t be seen as being associated with us." [18:19]
Carrie Gillom (on the significance of retracted studies):
- “I don’t think the damage, the misinformation that has been spread for 25 years... can be undone, that can’t be taken back.” [27:47]
- “Tobacco... where the playbook originated... Monsanto perfected it.” [28:34]
Judge's reaction in Monsanto litigation (paraphrased by Gillom):
- “If you had spent just half as much time, half as much money on making sure you had a safe product as you did on putting forth all of these engineered false narratives, you wouldn’t be in this situation today being sued by over 100,000 people.” [29:29]

Significant Timestamps

00:00–02:23: Introduction of Bruce Chassy; establishing the importance of academic credibility.
03:31–06:39: Monsanto’s dominance in the seed and agrochemical industries; launching GMOs and Roundup Ready seeds.
07:17–08:23: Exposure of ghostwriting in landmark glyphosate safety study.
10:26–14:03: California’s GMO labeling battle and Monsanto’s media campaign using academic voices.
14:19–16:10: Uncovering financial ties and PR arrangements through public records requests.
17:19–19:59: Specific examples of Monsanto directing and disguising academic publications.
20:36–21:22: Academic influence on regulatory decisions (EPA example).
22:59–25:55: Institutional donations; shaping research agendas and academic environments.
27:09–29:06: Retraction of the ghostwritten paper and origins/impact of the industry playbook.
29:29–30:24: Legal and financial consequences for Monsanto.

Conclusion

"Ghost Credits" exposes the mechanisms through which industry funding, strategic partnerships, and undisclosed collaborations have infiltrated American academia—undermining scientific integrity and shaping everything from regulatory policy to global public perception. The episode argues for greater transparency and vigilance in university-industry relations, highlighting the far-reaching consequences when corporate influence goes unchecked.

If interested in further exploring the legacy of academic-corporate scandals, the podcast also recommends previous seasons of "Gangster Capitalism" (on the College Admissions Scandal, the NRA, Liberty University). Send tips or feedback to campusfilespod@gmail.com.

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Transcript86 lines

[00:00]
A
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[01:59]
B
Our risk perception is not very scientific. In fact, it's not rational, it's not quantitative. We are disproportionately fearful of things that are new, that we don't understand, that we can't control, and about which there is uncertainty. And I think that a lot of the claimed risks of GMOs that the public is concerned about are simply falsehoods that have been propagated.
[02:23]
A
You wouldn't know it from his speeches, but Bruce Chassis was not independent. He was working with Monsanto, a major producer of GMOs and herbicides. And he wasn't alone. Several other academics were doing the exact same thing, defending GMOs in public while quietly collaborating with the company that made them professors.
[02:46]
C
And academics really have the trust of the public. So Monsanto used academics to carry the messaging for them.
[02:57]
A
Margo Gray. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files how one of the most powerful companies in agriculture recruited academics into its PR war. Tom Philpott has covered food and agriculture policy for almost two decades. He's seen a lot change in that time. But one thing has stayed the same. One company has dominated what American Farmers Monsanto.
[03:31]
D
By 2005, when I started writing about this stuff, Monsanto is already dominating the seed industry. And my very first blog post was about their market power.
[03:44]
A
Monsanto's market power is even more impressive when you look at the company's origins. Monsanto didn't start as an agriculture company. It started as a chemical producer.
[03:55]
B
Next time you fly, look around you. You'll see many ways Monsanto made your trip a little bit better. The luxurious carpeting of Acrilan acrylic. The tables made of Monsanto plastics. The dessert cakes made light and fluffy. Thanks to Monsanto Food Research,
[04:12]
A
Monsanto made a lot of chemicals that were very good for business and very bad for people. One of those was the chemical known as PCBs.
[04:21]
D
PCBs are sort of the forever chemicals of mid century America. Their harms were very, very apparent early on, and the company kept marketing them well after they knew how damaging they were.
[04:34]
A
PCBs were eventually banned by the US government, and that meant Monsanto had to figure out what came next. The company pivoted in a big way to agriculture. One of its chemists developed a new chemical, glyphosate. It was extremely effective at killing weeds. And in the 1970s, Monsanto began selling it under the brand name Roundup.
[04:57]
B
Roundup Herbicide by Monsanto. There's never been a herbicide like it before. Roundup controls many of the toughest grasses and weeds, including their.
[05:07]
A
Sales of Roundup were strong. But like other herbicides on the market, it had a limitation. Once crops sprouted, Roundup didn't just kill the weeds, it killed the crops too. So farmers could only spray it at certain times of the year until Monsanto changed the equation. In the early 1980s, company scientists genetically modified seeds to tolerate glyphosate, the active ingredient in roundup. And by 1996, Roundup Ready seeds were on the market. Now farmers could spray their seeds whenever they needed to. The chemical would kill the weeds, but not the crops. It was a game changer.
[05:47]
D
They knew that they had a blockbuster. If they could make this thing work, they would sell loads and loads of glyphosate. They knew that they were looking at billions and billions of dollars in Profits.
[06:03]
A
There was just one problem, a big one. Almost immediately, there were safety concerns. Animals exposed to glyphosate were developing tumors. And studies in the Midwest pointed to higher cancer rates among farmers who used Roundup heavily. This was the last thing Monsanto needed.
[06:21]
D
You're talking about a company that has lost a certain amount of public trust from its experiences in PCBs. So the company has a tarnished reputation. And it becomes really important, important to establish glyphosate as absolutely harmless.
[06:39]
A
That wasn't going to be easy. If Monsanto said the product was safe, people weren't just going to take their word for it. Not the public, not regulators. They needed someone else to say it. Preferably scientists, scientists who looked independent. And Monsanto worked to make that happen.
[06:59]
D
So a study comes out in 2000 by these three ostensibly independent researchers, researchers of good reputation who claimed to look at all the data and look at all the studies and concluded that it was not at, you know, any kind of human threat.
[07:18]
A
The paper looked great for Monsanto. Independent scientists concluding that glyphosate posed no cancer risk and no reproductive harm for humans. The thing is, these scientists weren't exactly operating independently. Behind the scenes, Monsanto employees were actually running the study. We know this because of emails that later became public.
[07:41]
D
In this incredible 2000 email from this executive to a bunch of other Monsanto employees, she praises her colleagues for their hard work over three years at data collection, writing, review and relationship building with the paper's authors. And so it ends up being a paper that is ghost written by Monsanto.
[08:02]
A
But at the time, no one realized this. So the paper was a massive success. It ended up in the top 1/10 of 1% of the most cited glyphosate studies in academic literature. And it became a key piece of evidence for regulators around the world. What would you say was Monsanto's takeaway from organizing this study?
[08:23]
D
It was this very successful operation that we can speculate, caused them to think, hmm, what else could we do with professors? What other ways could we sort of collaborate with professors to our benefit?
[08:40]
A
Over the coming years, Monsanto would find plenty of ways to collaborate with academics to do that. I'm Hannah.
[08:54]
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[10:27]
A
Roundup poses no risk to human health or safety. That was the conclusion of a major study published in 2000, supposedly written by three independent experts. What no one knew at the time was that the project had actually begun inside Monsanto's own headquarters. So the public listened, and for a while, calls to regulate Roundup quieted. But they didn't disappear. By the 2000 and tens, Americans were becoming more aware that a lot of their food supply relied on genetically engineered crops GMOs, and that those crops were often sprayed with herbicides. Like Roundup, Concern started to build, and in 2012 it boiled over in California, where grassroots activists pushed for mandatory GMO labeling.
[11:14]
C
It was really a low bar. Ask Europe has labeled genetically engineered foods for 20 years. It's common in many other countries, but we haven't been able to get it done here.
[11:25]
A
This is Stacey Malkin. She founded a nonprofit watchdog group called us right to know. In 2012, she helped lead the campaign to label GMOs in California. It wasn't easy. Getting an issue on the ballot in California is notoriously difficult, but this movement had real grassroots support.
[11:45]
H
It's just, you know, moms on the street petitioning to get that issue on the ballot. Massive volunteer effort People were volunteering full time like it was a job and really just made it unstoppable that this was going to be voted on by California voters.
[12:01]
A
She was right. The petition qualified for the ballot comfortably with nearly a million signatures. And going into the election, the campaign looks strong. Polling showed consistent 65% support. Even celebrities got involved. Danny DeVito, Caitlin Olson, Bill Maher. They cut an ad.
[12:20]
B
Here in America, you don't get the right to know if you're eating genetically
[12:24]
A
modified organisms unless, unless, unless, unless you demand it. Unless you demand that GMOs get labeled. Vote yes on Prop 37. Polling looks strong until October 1st. That's when Monsanto launched an aggressive countercampaign. They spent roughly a million dollars a day on ads. But the opposition didn't seem to be coming from Monsanto alone.
[12:51]
C
The astonishing thing about it was that so many seemingly independent third parties were using Monsanto's talking points. And that included professors who were constantly quoted in the press arguing against GMO labeling that GMOs are safe, pesticides are safe, ultra processed foods are safe, we don't need to worry. Anyone who's saying we need to worry not to be trusted. And it was over and over in many different forums.
[13:19]
A
Their quotes were everywhere, in newspapers, on tv, on the radio. And in the month leading up to the election, Stacy says things started to unravel. The activists weren't the ones driving the conversation anymore.
[13:32]
H
And then the public support tanked like a rock.
[13:36]
A
On election day, Prop 37 lost. Monsanto won.
[13:42]
H
So after that experience, we just really wanted to know how did they do this? Specifically, how did they have so many independent professors, Nobel laureate scientists, speaking the exact same language as the Monsanto led corporate campaign that convinced people to vote against a simple label?
[14:03]
A
Stacy and her colleagues at US Right to Know suspected some of these professors had ties to Monsanto, but they couldn't prove it. So they got creative. When someone works at a public university, their emails are public record. So Stacy filed records requests.
[14:20]
C
It is a long and tedious process that involves sometimes battling with universities, sometimes having to pay fees, many times having to file lawsuits to get documents, and then reading through them. We've gotten hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.
[14:39]
A
Many of the documents involved a professor at the University of Florida, Kevin Folta. He ran the plant science department there. Stacy had always been suspicious about his relationship with Monsanto, though Kevin Folta strongly
[14:53]
C
denied it multiple times. Said he was completely independent of industry and never took any money from industry. And then among the documents we found A proposal that he had submitted to Monsanto for a certain amount of money in exchange for doing public relations on biotech, promoting GMOs and biotech.
[15:15]
A
On this occasion, Monsanto agreed to give Kevin Folta an unrestricted grant of $25,000, meaning there were no formal limits on how the money could be used. Folter responded to the acceptance letter by saying, I'm grateful for this opportunity and promise a solid return on the investment. Another academic Stacy had been suspicious about was Bruce Chassis, a professor at the University of Illinois. Like Volta, Chassis regularly said that he didn't receive funding from industry, and we
[15:46]
C
found millions of dollars of payments to his university and payments to the professor himself from Monsanto. So really in an unraveling process, because the more you read, the more you start to see patterns about who's talking to who and where the connections are so that you can go back with more requests to go deeper.
[16:10]
A
Eventually, Stacy had gathered enough documents to share some of them with the New York Times. And in 2015, the paper put the story on its front page. The headline read, food Industry Enlisted Academics in GMO Lobbying War. Email Show. Once the story broke, Stacy released the full batch of emails to the public. And that's when Tom Philpott, the journalist we heard from earlier, began combing through them. Though at first he was hesitant.
[16:40]
D
It is intrusive for academics to get their email subpoenaed like that. So I was a little bit queasy to do it myself. But retrospectively, us right to know was exactly right to do it because there was so much going on under the radar that we had no idea of.
[16:58]
A
Tom went through a mountain of emails, and when he finished, he was floored. He told me he thought the New York Times might have actually underplayed just how methodical Monsanto was about leveraging academic credibility. Tell us about the email where the Monsanto executive sent professors kind of detailed proposals for policy briefs.
[17:19]
D
So this guy, Eric Sachs, who is Monsanto's strategic engagement lead, and in this particular project, he was the assignment editor and telling them, hey, here's some topics that you should consider writing about.
[17:33]
A
So if I'm playing devil's advocate here for a second, what is so wrong about that? If academics believe what they're writing, what is so wrong about taking a prompt suggestion from Eric Sachs and turning it into a policy brief?
[17:47]
D
My response to that would be the lack of disclosure. Professors are allowed to take public stances on, you know, especially on areas that are within their field, where the public trust gets a Little bit violated is when they don't disclose that they're working with the companies.
[18:10]
A
The academics didn't just forget to disclose they were working with Monsanto. The email showed that Monsanto was actually helping them hide the connection.
[18:20]
D
All through this correspondence there's this tone of, we know that you have to protect your independence. We know that you can't be seen as being associated with us.
[18:30]
A
And Monsanto followed through. The policy briefs were repackaged into OP eds and blog posts published under the names of the academics. Monsanto's name was nowhere on them, just credible sounding experts sharing their views. And this was just one of many jobs that Eric Sachs had for his academics, another big one responding to critical press coverage.
[18:55]
D
So he says there's been a piece published in Huffington Post. Can someone please go comment? Yeah, that was just hilarious. He felt empowered to do that. And he was right that they all enthusiastically took up the bait.
[19:10]
A
There was also the time a Monsanto executive asked Kevin Folta to submit a blog post to WebMD on the safety and health of biotechnology. He wrote to Folta, over the past six months, we've worked hard through third parties to insert fresh and current material on WebMD's website.
[19:27]
D
You know, I think this is just sort of like a measure of the sophistication of their strategy because this was a trusted source on medical advice and they wanted to make sure that they had trusted academics using their prestige to get in there and sort of inject themselves into the bloodstream. The consumer might say, oh yeah, should I Be concerned about GMOs and health? Let me Google that. And you get this WebMD page. And ideally for them, you've got Kevin Folta assuring you that everything is fine.
[19:59]
A
Monsanto also lined up speaking engagements for its academic allies, including overseas. In one email, Bruce Chassis, the University of Illinois professor, agreed to travel to China. Without knowing the purpose of the trip. He wrote to Monsanto, where am I speaking to whom? For how long? More importantly, what is the topic and is there an assigned title?
[20:24]
D
All of that was hilarious and satisfying and I think just so illuminating as to how deep, deeply these academics fell under the spell of this company.
[20:36]
A
But maybe the most significant role these academics played was when it came to regulation. In 2011, the EPA was weighing a rule that would have forced companies like Monsanto to hand over much more of its safety and environmental data. Monsanto wasn't going to let that happen. They quietly helped to organize a meeting between EPA officials and two industry friendly academics, Bruce Chassis and Nina Fedoroff. A former professor at Penn State.
[21:05]
D
She's very well respected. She had worked in the state departments of two different presidents, one Republican, one Democrat. So when she goes in there with Bruce Chassis and makes a case for light regulation, it obviously carries some weight.
[21:22]
A
After meeting with the epa, Bruce Chassis reported back to Monsanto that the meeting had been very surprisingly productive. Ultimately, the regulation never passed. We can't say exactly what role that meeting played, but we do know this Academics were helping Monsanto make its case. And it wasn't just individual professors. Universities were part of the picture too.
[21:54]
I
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[23:00]
A
Monsanto and its academic allies had a pretty good thing going. Both sides benefited. Professors received funding for their labs and for travel. They got speaking invitations, press coverage, a wider audience for their research. And Monsanto. Monsanto got something it couldn't manufacture in house credibility. Independent seeming experts who could step in to defend its herbicides when a bad headline hit or when regulators started circling. But the relationship extended beyond a handful of professors. Monsanto also built ties with universities themselves. In one academic year, Monsanto gave the University of Florida a million dollar grant. Another year, Monsanto gave the University of Illinois a million dollar pledge to renovate one of its teaching labs. It is common for companies to donate to universities, but these weren't small checks. These were major institutional investments. So I understand how Monsanto benefited from giving money to the individual academics. They speak at conferences, they respond to negative media coverage, they write WebMD posts. But how does Monsanto benefit from giving that much money to a university?
[24:17]
H
It's unclear what they gain specifically because the universities don't have to tell us.
[24:22]
A
This is Stacy Malkin, who we heard from earlier.
[24:25]
H
But there could be many benefits from corporate giving to universities. Yeah, it makes them look good. It makes them look like good citizens.
[24:33]
A
Stacy says Monsanto didn't just get goodwill from donating to universities. The company got influence over research not by changing research results, but by shaping what questions got studied in the first place. And that matters because the questions scientists choose to ask determine the body of knowledge that follows. Stacy says you can see that dynamic in the debate over why bees are dying. There's been strong evidence that certain pesticides can harm bee populations. But most of the industry funded research focuses on other culprits.
[25:08]
C
The industry's focus is to conduct studies about other things, like everything else besides pesticides, like the impact of mites, the impact of climate, whatever it may be, and diminish the focus on pesticides.
[25:23]
A
Donating to universities brought another benefit too. It gave Monsanto a foothold on campus. At the University of Florida and at UC Davis, the company helped to organize conferences. Though its involvement wasn't publicized anywhere, they were attended by scientists and journalists. The focus was learning how to communicate modern biotechnology to the public in a way that felt accessible. Which sounds harmless enough, but according to Stacey, these conferences were really doing something else.
[25:55]
C
They would bring together young scientists and journalists to these events and do the dog and pony show about how to promote GMOs and pesticides, why they're safe. And the funding of this was misrepresented to the people who attended. Organizers said it was a combination of government funding and university funding and industry funding. But actually the funding was straight up industry.
[26:23]
A
The funding can be hard to trace because universities have different channels they can route donations through.
[26:30]
H
Many universities set up these private foundations, which are themselves 501c3 nonprofits. And nonprofit entities are not required to publicly disclose who funds them. University of Florida foundation, for example, takes grant money from Monsanto, Bayer DuPont Pioneer and doesn't disclose it. So it's really important what students in universities do to demand transparency from their universities to ask who did the research, who paid for the research? What is the story they're trying to tell?
[27:09]
A
That's the kind of scrutiny that recently led to a setback for monsanto. Remember the 2000 study, the one that concluded glyphosate was safe for humans? It appeared to have been written by independent experts, but it was later revealed to have been ghostwritten by Monsanto. And in December 2025, the publisher officially retracted it. 25 years later, I wanted to understand what that actually means. Does a retraction this far down the line change anything? So I called someone who's been tracking this study from the beginning, Investigative Journal journalist Carrie Gillom.
[27:48]
K
The retraction, 25 years after the publication means a lot to a very small group of players. I don't think the damage, the misinformation that has been spread for 25 years, that is filtered down into regulatory decisions and market decisions and ultimately consumer and other user decisions about that definitely can't be undone, that can't be taken back.
[28:16]
A
And that's part of what made Monsanto's playbook so powerful. Attach scientific credibility to acclaim, and it can shape public understanding for decades, even when new evidence complicates the picture. But Carrie reminded me of something. This strategy predates Monsanto.
[28:34]
K
The tobacco industry was sort of where the playbook originated, but it has been adopted by oil and gas and pharmaceuticals and clearly chemical and the agrochemical industry. I think many people believe, and I probably do, too, although I don't have as much experience with those other industries, that maybe Monsanto was the big daddy of it. Like, they perfected it. This was in their DNA. This was in everything they did.
[29:06]
A
Eventually, the strategy caught up with Monsanto. Starting in 2018, the company went to trial for a series of lawsuits over Roundup. One of those lawsuits was filed by a California school groundskeeper. He argued that Roundup had given him cancer and that Monsanto had manipulated science and intentionally misled the public all along.
[29:30]
K
This is a case that I covered really, really closely. There was one judge in the litigation who started out pretty skeptical of the claims against Monsanto. And after the evidence had been laid out about using all these third parties, using these academics, creating all of these sort of narratives that were supposedly independent but were really created by Monsanto and carried forward by academics and others, the judge comes out, and he was just outraged and paraphrasing. But his message was, if you had spent just half as much time, half as much money on making sure you had a safe product as you did on putting forth all of these engineered false narratives, you wouldn't be in this situation today being sued by over 100,000 people.
[30:25]
A
All told, Monsanto's parent company has now faced Ra roughly $14 billion related to Roundup cancer lawsuits. And the litigation still isn't fully over. If you've got a story idea, we would love to hear about it. Send us an email@campusfilespodmail.com and if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode while you're there. Leave us a review and a five star rating. Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast hosted by Margot Gray and Ian Mond. Our executive producers are Leah Rees Dennis and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont and Margot Gray, sound design and engineering by Andy Jaskowitz and Zach Clark, legal support by Living, Laura Berman and Melissa Jean. Original music by Davy Sumner. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Rose, Sean Cherry, Kurt Courtney and Lauren Vieira.
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