In the 1980s and 1990s, Monsanto CEO Richard J. Mahoney spent much of his energy battling the forces of the political left that sought to stigmatize and ban foods produced in the new frontier of genetic modification.
Today, Mahoney, a lifelong Republican and retired from the business world, finds himself in a similar position, but with a much different adversary. Now he rails against the forces of the religious right that seek to stifle the new frontier of science -- stem cell research.
Mahoney lives in the St. Louis area and devotes much of his energy to academia at Washington University, where he is a trustee. He is also among a prominent group of business leaders, mostly from St. Louis and Kansas City, who have sought to build the Show Me State into one of the nation's premier biotechnology and agriculture science centers. Opposition to stem cell research, they believe, not only stifles good science but also threatens the state's business growth.
The battle between Mahoney and his cohort of old-school Republicans -- typified by the business elite and the country club crowd -- and the new guard -- typified by rural and suburban social conservatives in the vast swath between the state's two major metropolitan areas -- underscores the emerging schism in the party.
Much in the same way that free trade splinters the Democratic Party, stem cell research exposes ideological cracks in the GOP. Those cracks are giving Democrats hope of regaining power in states such as Missouri that have trended Republican of late.
If MTV were trying to highlight the issue, it could do a "Celebrity Death Match" between two of Missouri's favorite sons: socially moderate former senator and U.N. ambassador John Danforth and socially conservative former senator and U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft.
Mahoney comes down squarely in the Danforth corner. Danforth urges moderate Christians to take a more active role in his party, and he advocates stem cell research.
"Do I think a lot of Republicans are going to go out and vote for Democrats because of this?" Mahoney said rhetorically last week. "No. But if the independents start leaving, this could be the thing that pushes them to do that."
I met Mahoney last week at a conference in Cape Cod sponsored by Washington University's Weidenbaum Center -- named for Murray Weidenbaum, a former top economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan -- and the George Mason University Department of Economics. At the conference, journalists from around the country participated in seminars led by mostly conservative and libertarian economists from George Mason, Washington University and the University of Chicago.
Mahoney comes off as a smooth, gregarious, self-deprecating patrician, tooling around Cape Cod in a pink button-down shirt, with a sweater tied around his neck, boat shoes on his feet. He is the prototypical economic conservative, lecturing on the glories of the free enterprise system, railing against government regulation and taxation.
For years while running Monsanto, the St. Louis-based mega-biotech firm, he served as the company's pitchman for genetically modified foods, which the company was on the forefront of developing. He spent much of his time on the public relations campaign to assure the public of the safety of such foods, which have now become common in the United States, and increasingly so in other parts of the world such as Europe, where liberal politicians, lawmakers and regulators once had success keeping them out of the market.
Mahoney retired happily and very comfortably from Monsanto in 1995, but kept up his profile in St. Louis with a string of academic, philanthropic and community endeavors.
