The author is a student at Herron High School in Indianapolis, Indiana.
In 1901, John Queeny, despite having to quit school and start working at the age of 12, founded Monsanto Chemical Works – a company that would succeed and nearly hold a monopoly over the agriculture industry. Monsanto would force farmers, people, and even governments into decades of disease, public health crises, and relentless legal battles.
Today, Monsanto is most recognized for their pesticide products such as its Roundup line; however, the company originally started out producing saccharin, known to many as those familiar pink sugar packets used to sweeten beverages. Saccharin is a zero-calorie sweetener that, at the time of its creation, was almost exclusively produced in Germany. Despite having a history in pharmaceuticals, Queeny thought the untapped food additive market in the United States was an ideal way to raise a fortune. The young company survived all the way up to World War I, where it found a new genre to reign in success: material and chemical production. While before the United States had relied on German chemical imports, Monsanto Chemical Works filled the gap after foreign chemical imports collapsed during the war. This shift helped Monsanto turn Queeny’s fledgling company to a leading force in the American chemical industry.
The patent to produce PCBs
Dec. 1, 2025, Chicago Attorney General Kwame Raoul reported that his office had just settled a lawsuit with American agricultural and biotechnology company Monsanto for $120 million. In 2022, his office filed the lawsuit against Monsanto, claiming that Monsanto knew their polychlorinated biphenyls (PBC) were not only toxic, but were contaminating the local environment.
These lawsuits are nothing new. In 2016, a Washington state school sued Monsanto because students were exposed to PCBs. After this, Monsanto was sued by the city of Seattle, followed by the state of Oregon, Ohio and Delaware, as well as multiple counties, cities, and schools. Including only public and settled cases, Monsanto has been forced to pay more than $1 billion in settlements since 2016 because of their PCBs.
But what are PCBs, and why is Monsanto being sued over something that used to be found in pretty much everything? PCB is a heat-resistant “forever” compound that was once essential for electrical equipment. In the 1920s, Swann Chemical Company developed and patented the process to create PCBs — and in 1935, Monsanto, under Edgar Monsanto Queeny‘s leadership, bought the Swann Chemical Company. This gave Monsanto the patent to produce PCBs. According to the Washington Post, almost immediately after opening, Monsanto’s PCB plant in Anniston, Alabama was plagued with reports of people with pus-filled boils on their skin, liver disease, neurological issues and more. In 1937, Monsanto hired Harvard public health researcher Cecil Kent Drinker to investigate the impact of PCBs on employee health.
Drinker’s analysis showed that even small dosages of PCBs, when in contact with skin, ingested and even breathed in can severely damage liver and harm general health — with two documented employees being in the hospital for two weeks. Despite this, Edgar Queeny decided that the profit margins were just too good to stop production. The discovery of PCBs’ toxicity was not treated as a tragedy, but rather as a monetary liability. Instead of doing anything about the dying factory workers, Monsanto told workers that their failing kidneys and oozing skin were because they didn’t bathe enough.
After founding his own town in order to pay fewer taxes, Monsanto also dumped toxic sludge from their Anniston Plant into local creeks, rivers and pits. This sludge leaked into local neighborhoods and turned the water into a mix of red, yellow, blue and even black battery acids. Children and families carried chemicals on their skin, and wildlife in Snow Creek suffered. In 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist named Denzel Ferguson to find out exactly how deadly the effects had been. When Ferguson submerged 25 fish into local creeks, all 25 lost equilibrium and died within three minutes. He noted that the water “would probably kill fish [even] when diluted 1,000 times or so” (Washington Post).
Ferguson, like Drinker, urged Monsanto to do something about their pollution. How did Monsanto respond? They didn’t. They didn’t say a thing about their practices — not until Swedish studies showed the public how deadly PCBs were. When called out, Monsanto “reduced” the amount of contaminants leaking into Snow Creek. However, records within Monsanto show that the Anniston plant was still dumping 50,000 pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek, and over 1 million pounds of PCB waste, into landfills annually. While the Monsanto empire continued to poison Alabama, Edgar Queeny branched out into Texas. This would be one of the worst industrial accidents in history. But what was it to Queeny? Just one big loss of profit.
On the morning of April 16, 1947, a fire on a French sea vessel created a series of explosions that eventually caused Monsanto’s plant in Texas City to implode. Within the factory, tanks of styrene, an extremely flammable liquid, would be ruptured, thus exploding into a blazing inferno of chemicals. 234 employees were killed, and over 200 were injured (Wikipedia). By the end of the incident, all of the Monsanto firefighting team was dead. In total, over five thousand were injured by the accident. Within a year, the Texas City plant was open again, churning out plastics.
Turning to insecticides, herbicides
Soon, Monsanto would pivot once more to what it’s known for today: agriculture. During World War II, Monsanto started to manufacture insecticides, and then afterwards, herbicides. Decades later, as the United States fought a losing battle in Vietnam, they found themselves needing something that would get rid of the jungle that gave the Viet Cong their advantage:Agent Orange.
Agent Orange, a chemical product made up of 2,4‑D and 2,4,5‑T, was manufactured to kill all vegetation in sight. Monsanto was the main supplier of Agent Orange to the U.S. during the war. The United States then proceeded to spray some 20 million gallons of Agent Orange over not just rainforest, but entire communities (Wikipedia). Four million people were exposed, and in the 1970s, mothers’ breast milk and the blood of military personnel were found to have high levels of dioxin in it. In a study by Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan, children in areas sprayed by Agent Orange were born with birth defects, such as cleft palates, mental disabilities, hernias and extra fingers and toes. Dioxin was so toxic that children continued to be born with defects even generations after initial exposure. After the war, Monsanto would continue to produce herbicides.
This time, these herbicides affected everyone. These pesticides were made up of an acid called 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4,5-T. Made by heating hydroxide ions and a benzene ring with 4 chlorine atoms, the heat forces the hydroxide to replace the chlorine and allows for more chemicals to be attached, thus giving you 2,4,5-T.
Now, where do the public safety issues appear? The temperature needed to make 2,4,5-T is exactly 338℉. However, even just a slight variation in the temperature gives the system enough energy to fuse molecules and create dioxin. Dioxin is a pollutant that, when in your body, mimics your hormones and alters the way your cells behave — causing immune system, developmental and endocrine damage. In addition, it also poses carcinogenic and skin disorder risks. Like before, when Monsanto was notified of this by researchers, the company opted to tell no one. However, when people eventually started to catch on that 2,4,5-T was dangerous, Monsanto needed another herbicide;something safer like — glyphosate.
Editors’ note: For more on glyphosate, including the impact of President Trump’s Feb. 18, 2026 executive order, read this story by YEPT’s Ohio Director Asal Mohammadi.
An herbicide that blocked a plant’s ability to create amino acids, they named the glyphosate product “Roundup.” It was perfect for the average consumer, and useful for farmers who needed pesky weeds out of their crops. Roundup worked wonders, killing every plant it touched — the only issue was that it killed every plant it touched. Farmers could only spray it on their fields so much without damaging their crops. However, if Monsanto could find a way to make crops resistant to Roundup, then they’d have a monopoly on their hands.
Farmers sign the deal
Chemical plants produce a lot of waste, and while most things can’t survive the toxic byproducts, there’s always an exception. Monsanto researchers went to their glyphosate factories and scooped up anything that was somehow still alive despite all of the glyphosate — most importantly, salmonella strains. Monsanto could now inject the salmonella’s glyphosate resistant genes into their plants. They’d found a way to make one of the best herbicides on the market and resistant crops to go along with it. Farmers could get their hands on these crops just by signing Monsanto’s Technology Use Agreement. All a farmer had to do was sign to a list of agreements, including to not save or clean their crops or seeds, to supply the seed to no one and to allow Monsanto access to their land
Farmers signed Monsanto’s deal in droves. Even if someone didn’t sign, Monsanto’s company would be at your door, and not just as salespeople. Dave Runyon, an Indiana farmer, said in an interview with CBS news, “I wasn’t using their products, but yet they were pounding on my door demanding information, demanding records.” Runyon had never bought Monsanto products, but a few days after this, he got a letter from Monsanto threatening to sue him for patent infringement. Monsanto sent cops, private detectives, planes, helicopters, letters, hotlines and more, all to find farmers who had allegedly “misused” Monsanto’s products. By 2013, Monsanto had acquired over 20 million dollars from farmers who they had sued.
On March 20th, 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer reported that glyphosate was carcinogenic to humans. Roundup customers were being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, respiratory issues and more. Monsanto, before the 2015 research came out, had sold 1.7 billion pounds of Roundup in 2014 alone. Customers who had used Roundup and developed health issues afterward sued Monsanto. Monsanto was forced to give up internal papers to lawyers, and suddenly, Monsanto wasn’t just a pesticide company with a shady past. Internal documents, again, showed Monsanto had known glyphosate was carcinogenic and yet did nothing about it. But other national and even international health organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization had said that glyphosate was safe in the past — but Monsanto had pressured them into approving it.
Before this — in order to make the idea that glyphosate was safe — Bill Heydens, the former Regulatory Product Safety Assessment Lead of Monsanto, suggested having Monsanto employees write papers as ghost authors on glyphosate and afterwards having non-Monsanto scientist: “just edit & sign their names so to speak,” so that Monsanto could get their message pushed out, all while having credible names on the cover. He also sent an email to his coworkers about “approaching EPA and… asking if there is anything that would help them defend the situation.”
When glyphosate was found to be cancerous, lawsuits piled up, and every new document from before this revelation was revealed only served to further fuel the fire. Then, in 2018, after Monsanto had just been forced to pay $289 million, and at the peak of its controversy, Bayer bought Monsanto, and all of the debt and lawsuits that came along with it. The name Monsanto was dropped, Roundup and other products were rebranded, and the 117 year old legacy of Monsanto was gone.
Today, people still live with the effects of PCB exposure, entire generations are plagued with mental and physical disabilities caused by Agent Orange and millions live with cancers and other long term issues caused by something they were all told was harmless. Monsanto may be gone, but the people and everyone who enabled them — impacted will live with the effects of Monsanto’s actions forever. Monsanto demonstrates the lengths corporations will go in order to make a profit. While not the only example of this, Monsanto’s history highlights the challenges of regulating powerful corporations and the hardship in ensuring transparency, accountability, and public safety within them.
