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believe that all the media attention
has distorted the facts, making it
appear as if a majority of Americans
are worried. But depending on who
you talk to or which study you read,
consumers are either indifferent and
that bST has "no benefits for consumers
and may pose some risks."
CPI claims that there is an increased
incidence of an udder infection called
mastitis in bST-treated cows. This
leads to lower quality milk "contain-
workshops and evaluations of bST,
and is frequently cited in the studies
that are used to confirm the safety of
the hormone. His research has been
supported by Monsanto, Upjohn,
American Cyanamid, the U.S. De-
Even ice cream empire Ben & Jerry's has opposed bSTfrom
the beginning, claiming that the drug would further industrialize
the farm and run family farmers out of business.
willing to drink milk from treated
cows or terrified and prepared to give
up dairy products forever.
"The public is really minimally
concerned," says Hardy of Boyce
Thompson. He cites a study conducted
by the University of North
Carolina that questioned more than
1,000 people and found that more
than 80 percent had no concern about
bST. Hardy thinks that the press has
given a distorted view of the issue
by focusing on highly vocal "organizations
that have an objective to be
anti-biotech."
Two such groups, the Foundation
on Economic Trends (FET) and its
subsidiary The Pure Food Campaign
(PFC), say that thousands of consumers
fear the government is not telling
the truth about bST. It has been
fighting the product for years and has
organized protests in major cities
that feature milk being dumped into
gutters or poured into milk cans
marked "toxic milk." The FET estimates
that it has about 18,000 consumer
supporters in the United
States. The group also has enlisted
some of the country's top chefs for a
boycott of all gene-altered foods.
When the movie Jurassic Park
opened last summer, PFC distributed
flyers about biotech produce,
featuring a picture of Tyrannosaurus
Rex wheeling a shopping cart. The
flyer asked "Is Jurassic Supermarket
next?"
The Consumer Policy Institute
(CPI), the research arm of the Consumers
Union, of Yonkers, NY, says
ing more pus and bacteria" than milk
from untreated cows, says CPI scientist
Michael Hansen. He disputes
the assertion that milk from treated
cows is the same as that of untreated
ones, and says that milk from animals
that receive the hormone has higher
levels of a secondary hormone called
IGF-1, a substance that some scientists
say may cause cancer.
There has been a call for labeling
of products that contain milk from
cows treated with BGH. Since early
February, when bST went on the
market, several dairies have tried to
label their products as coming from
cows that were not treated with the
hormone. Even ice cream maker Ben
& Jerry's has opposed bST from the
beginning, claiming that the drug
would further industrialize the farm
and run family farmers out of business.
The company has prepared 8
million lid labels that declare the milk
and cream used in its products come
from cows receiving no supplemental
bST.
A bemused Dale Bauman has
watched the media debate with an
increasing sense of wonder. "It's
fascinating to me," he says. "In science,
there are a lot of areas where
knowledgeable people disagree.
Safety of food products from bSTtreated
cows is not one of them."
Bauman was the first person to
recognize the power of the hormone
in increasing milk output. He is an
author of one of the background research
reports the Federal Office of
Technology Assessment used in its
JUNE 1994
25
partment of Agriculture, the National
Institutes of Health, the National
Science Foundation and several dairy
cooperatives.
Raised on a Michigan dairy farm,
Bauman put bST on the national
agenda in the late 1970s when he
started researching why some animals
use nutrients more efficiently
than others. He was looking into this
question at the same time molecular
biologists were figuring out how to
make exact duplicates of genes (a
process called cloning) and inserting
them into the genetic material of
other organisms in the first gene
splicing experiments.
"We had a concept, we had an
idea, all we needed was a way to test
it," Bauman says. His first experiments
were conducted with samples
of the bovine hormone that the National
Institutes of Health had extracted
from pituitary glands of
slaughtered animals, and made available
to scientists all over the world.
In the early 1980s, the thenfledgling
biotechnology company
Genentech fished the gene for bST
out of cow DNA and genetically engineered
a strain of E. coli bacteria
to produce the hormone. Once the
gene was inserted in the bacteria,
large quantities of bST could be made
easily through fermentation and purification
techniques. "One of the first
recombinant proteins made was bovine
somatotropin," says Bauman.
By late 1981, a collaboration between
Genentech and Monsanto was
able to supply Bauman with some of