Project: Archive of Agricultural Genetic Engineering and Society Center Interviewee: Dr. Pam Marrone, CEO and founder of Marrone Bio Innovations Interviewers: Matthew Booker, Brad Herring Interview Date: October 26, 2015 Location: NC State University, Hunt Library Length: 01:34:43 Learn more at https://go.ncsu.edu/AAGES SEE FULL TRANSCRIPT AT: https://research.ncsu.edu/ges/files/2017/09/Marrone_Pam_20151026_Transcript_Final.pdf 00:11 - It’s October 26th, 2015. Please tell us your name, your institution, and your roles. 00:23 - And what does it mean to be CEO and founder in a practical sense? 00:35 - And is that what you wanted to be when you were growing up? 01:07 - And why was that motivating you as a child? 02:18 - And you didn't think that these products were already being created by industry or were available? 03:15 - Okay, so to put some dates on this you start college as an undergrad around? 03:21 - 1974 and you knew that you wanted to be an entomologist? 03:34 - And did you have mentors or people in your world as an undergraduate who were important in maintaining that disciplinary interest or did you simply drive yourself? 04:19 - So you knew you wanted to be an entomologist, you achieved your bachelor's degree in entomology, correct? 04:24 - At Cornell. What did you decide to do in terms of going on for further study? 08:41 - So I'm going to ask you more questions about that because it's fascinating. But I want to ask you if you—you were training to be an entomologist but your program—your actual dissertation sounds a lot like ecology. It sounds like it leads to a comprehensive look. It was the ecosystem— 09:02 - And so you were forced to think about not just the insect and isolation, but it's habitats, the control mechanism, all sort of things. 09:16 - And similarly it sounds like at Monsanto you were confronted with problems which reached beyond simply looking at the insect in isolation. 09:34 - So that was a habit for you. Was it a habit for people at Monsanto? 10:46 - So you said that Monsanto was moving into biology. What do you mean by that and why do you say they were moving as a company into biology? 11:50 - So this is a significant shift in the kind of work you were doing, right? I mean—or as a graduate student had you explored bio-control or in general or genetic engineering at all? 13:18 - So you come into Monsanto. This is 1980? 13:22 - ’83. You're freshly minted with your Ph.D. And rather quickly though you became an important part of Monsanto's new initiatives. How did that develop? How did you move from simply being a newbie? 16:21 - So what were the consequences that is to say what did your group achieve in those years you were at Monsanto? 17:49 - So I have several questions. One would be what else was Monsanto working on at the time or did the company—did the people around you in the company think that they were working on a broad array of possible solutions—ways to move beyond the toxic legacy I think you called it or parathion and chemicals. 23:41 - So one of the elements of that story that's interesting is that this was a partnership of university researchers and private companies. Or at least that's the way that it sounds like you sought that. Today there's—in recent months and in recent years there's been a lot of criticism by the public including a recent New York Times piece of publicly funded researchers receiving money from private companies. And there seems to be some anxiety about that. Could you---do you think Monsanto might have achieved its goals without partnering with universities? 25:24 - And it also sounds like this was a genuine problem of interest not just to the companies. 27:08 - So you said a few minutes ago that Monsanto was motivated from the very top by an ideology that they would abandon—that they would leave behind this toxic legacy of their chemical company basis. And move into genetic engineering and other—possibly other tools as well. Do you think that that ideological nature that desire ran into money problems when it comes to this sorts of decisions they made to stop for example the research on the natural products you mentioned? I mean why did they narrow their scope from a series of possible endeavors to just a hand full? 30:17 - So these voices at the back of the room asking these questions these are questions about the social consequences of the technology or what kinds of questions might they have asked? 31:04 - So these are not questions about whether the technology will work on its scientific or technological merits. These are questions about what happens if it does work?