10 



Well, I did get to ski this past March. As he and I were going up 

 a lift on a beautiful, bright sunny day, high in the Rockies, he 

 turned to me and said, "It was all worth this one run." 



Thank you. 



Mr. Studds. Thank you very much. I like your approach to life so 

 much I may consult with you later about NAFTA. I really appreci- 

 ate your testimony. 



Mr. Studds. Next is Mr. Steve Brewer of the Monsanto Compa- 

 ny- 



STATEMENT OF DR. STEVE BREWER, MANAGER, BIOPRODUCTS 

 CHEMISTRY, MONSANTO COMPANY-SEARLE, ST. LOUIS, MIS- 

 SOURI 



Mr. Brewer. Thank you for inviting me to testify before this 

 Committee. My name is Steve Brewer, manager of Bioproducts 

 Chemistry at Monsanto. Monsanto is a worldwide development and 

 manufacturing company of high-value agricultural and chemical 

 products, pharmaceuticals and food ingredients (NutraSweet), with 

 1992 sales of $7.8 billion. Over the past four years Monsanto has 

 collaborated with the Missouri Botanical Gardens to obtain ap- 

 proximately 10,000 plant samples from the United States and 

 Puerto Rico, which are used in our screening program. 



In the document I submitted — I think mine was one of the more 

 extensive ones — you will find a very detailed rationale for why we 

 decided to actually carry out this program. I took a different cut 

 than some of the other people by asking, "Where did the 20 best- 

 selling drugs in the U.S.A. come from and what was the role of nat- 

 ural products in their discovery?" (These drug sales were worth $8 

 billion in 1988). 



[Answer]: All owe much of their origins to natural products re- 

 search. It is a very convincing story and there is no doubt in our 

 minds that natural products are important and worth investing in. 

 The plants themselves seem to have played a role in the discovery 

 of seven out of twenty of the best-selling drugs in the U.S.; the rest 

 came from microbes and animal tissue. Even snake venom has 

 played its role! 



The next is the concept of random screening; where you take a 

 collection of natural products or even synthetic chemicals and you 

 screen for activity. When I looked for the importance of that in the 

 top-20 drugs discovery, it was apparent that maybe 50 percent of 

 them had emerged from this approach of random screening. Other 

 approaches, such as rational chemical synthesis, were important 

 for a quarter of them, and chance observation (an absolutely essen- 

 tial method whereby we make discoveries), were the major ways in 

 which we found the 20 drugs. In Monsanto's plant screening pro- 

 gram what happens is that the botanists from the Botanical Gar- 

 dens have gone to various areas of the United States; they have 

 collected plants. They are returned to us. We grind these plants up 

 and extract them for small molecules which we then screen for 

 pharmaceutical activities using various enzymes and receptors as 

 targets. The rationale is that if you can inhibit their activity, then 

 it should lead to a useful drug. 



