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July 18, 2023
By Mike
Lessiter
John Franz & the Glyphosate Discovery
With no prior cropping knowledge, John Franz was an unlikely candidate
to change farming’s fortunes
Editor’s Note: This
installment of “Your No-Till History” expands upon a 1-page article
that appeared in June 2022.
Glyphosate (or
Roundup), brought to market by Monsanto in the mid 1970s, is a
virtually ideal herbicide, says international weed authority Dr.
Stephen Powles, and a “once-in-100-years breakthrough” that was “as
important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for
battling disease.”
Farmers on the
1974 and 1975 Hawaii trips run by No-Till Farmer saw the new
herbicide in research plots. Approved to much anticipation in 1976,
farmers suddenly had access to a product that promised to eradicate
troublesome weeds —without the plow.
It’s no
coincidence that U.S. no-till acres grew 2.5 times in Roundup’s
first 10 years and 7-fold by the time the exclusive patent expired
in 2000. Its enormous impact on no-till — on yields, income and
ability to farm more acres with less fuel, machinery and labor — is
difficult to quantify, as is the value of keeping soil in its place
and avoiding the runoff of sediment and fertilizer.
Indiana no-tiller
and conservationist Ray McCormick continues to staunchly defend
glyphosate.
“It’s going to
save the planet because no-till, cover crops and soil health help
sequester the carbon, and Roundup made that possible. Roundup and
Monsanto have been heroes.”
To tell the
history of glyphosate, we turn to a discovery of our own. We located
a 59-page transcript from an oral history project sponsored by the
Society of Chemical Industry of Wilkes University Chemistry
Professor Dr. James J. Bohning’s 1994 interview with glyphosate
herbicide patentee John E. Franz of Monsanto. Franz is now 93.
John E. Franz was the second youngest of six children
in his family, raised in Springfield, Ill. His father was manager of
a dairy, Sangamon Dairy Products Co., and had only a grade-school
education before entering the workforce. His mother was a homemaker,
and John would be the only one of the children to pursue a career in
science.
Franz attended Springfield Junior College for a year
before enrolling at the University of Illinois and then attended the
University of Minnesota for his Ph.D. in organic chemistry.
An
Impressive Bio
Numerous Monsanto and Bayer (which now owns Monsanto)
news releases, coupled with the interview transcript, provide an
overview of Franz’ career.
After completing his doctorate in 1955, Franz
accepted a job with Monsanto’s Organic Division (Monsanto didn’t
have an Agricultural Division until 1960). There he worked on a
variety of projects that included polymer flame-retardants.
In 1967, Franz jumped at a chance to transfer to the
new Ag Division because he liked its emphasis on publishing,
academic contacts and the freedom to pursue ideas.
“For a year, I studied plant physiology and did basic
plant growth studies; no chemistry,” Franz says. “During the year I
spent with the biologists and plant physiologists I became convinced
that the biorational approach was the direction to move in.”
![](images/images_07_20_2023/John-Franz-Discovered-Glyphosate.jpg)
“He tried to get
chemists interested in the project, and everybody rejected it. They
thought, ‘Dead area! Don’t bother me with this…” – John E. Franz
For discovering glyphosate (Roundup) as a
herbicide in 1970, Franz has been recognized with numerous awards —
far outstripping the $5 he got from Monsanto for the first glyphosate
patent. Some of the most notable honors include becoming the first
recipient of the Queeny Award in 1983, Monsanto’s highest technical
award to recognize an invention of commercial success. In 1987, Pres.
Ronald Reagan presented Franz with the National Medal of Technology,
recognizing Roundup’s impact “upon the production of agricultural food
and fiber as well as agricultural practices throughout the world.” He
also received the Perkin Medal in 1990 in recognition of his
contributions to research and development of applied chemistry.
Farm Chemicals magazine, in its September 1994 100th anniversary
edition, named the original Roundup herbicide one of the “Top 10
Products That Changed the Face of Agriculture,” in large measure for
enabling and encouraging conservation tillage. Two years later,
Monsanto received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development
for “pioneering sustainable technologies.”
Franz retired from Monsanto in 1991 with his name attached to more
than 840 U.S. and foreign patents. In 2007, he was inducted into the
U.S. Inventor’s Hall of Fame.
Start of Roundup’s Discovery
Franz says the “glyphosate as a herbicide” story began in 1960, 10
years before glyphosate was discovered. “The thing that started all
this off was a couple of chemists in the Inorganic Division of
Monsanto had developed a new process for making a class of compounds
called tertiary aminomethylphosphonic acids. This class of compounds
were of interest as sequestering agents, detergents and complexing
agents.”
When the chemists found a simple process of making the compounds, the
inorganic division cranked them out for testing.
“A Fellow who ran the plant physiology section of Ag by the name Dr.
Philip Hamm was interested in getting these compounds tested for
herbicide and plant growth regulating properties. Apparently, at that
time, they weren’t being submitted into a general screen, so he
collected them and brought them over to Ag and started screening them
because he was head of the screening section.”
Roundup Was Totally
Different...
In 1970, most farmers believed they had no choice but to use
herbicides and tilling to control weeds. At the time, most herbicides
were pre-emergent, meaning they created a chemical barrier on the
surface of a field and killed weeds when they sprouted through this
barrier and came into contact with the herbicide. To be effective,
pre-emergent herbicides had to spread when they were applied to
fields, ensuring a consistent, even barrier against sprouting weeds.
They also needed to stay active for a long time so they could continue
to be effective after the spring rainy season.
These two traits were environmentally problematic because pre-emergent
herbicides could wash into streams and ground water, potentially
affecting wildlife and fish.
The original Roundup herbicide was different. It was found to
decompose into natural products — carbon dioxide, phosphoric acid and
ammonia — and to be safe for humans and wildlife. Environmentally
speaking, the original herbicide proved to be one of the safest
herbicides in the history of agriculture.
Source: Bayer (which acquired Monsanto in 2018) materials on Roundup’s
History
Franz noted that the inorganic chemists who
originally made these compounds were making them as complexing agents.
“The fact that Hamm had to procure the compounds for ag screening
indicated that the inorganic chemists weren’t interested in them as
herbicides, and they weren’t even thinking of them in those terms.”
In the screening process, Hamm found two compounds that had
interesting perennial herbicidal properties. They were interesting,
but weak and not commercial-type products. “Hamm was pretty enthused
about it, though, because there weren’t too many compounds that were
useful or actually sold for perennial herbicide activity in the early
1960s.”
Glyphosate’s First Field
Test
In their 1994 interview, Dr. James J. Bohning asked glyphosate’s
discoverer, John Franz, how long it took after the synthesis of his
discovery for a field test to show that its promise.
“About 3 months,” Franz says with a laugh. “As a matter of fact, when
Dr. Phil Hamm, the head of Monsanto’s herbicide screening program, saw
it in the greenhouse for the first time, he said, ‘It’s commercial.’
Just like that.
“Everybody else said, ‘Oh, come on; you can’t know that.’ He knew it.
Of course, he had a lot of experience, and he predicted it right off
the bat. Well, they really couldn’t tell that from the greenhouse
experiments. They did a lot in the greenhouse, what were called
primary screening experiments. They also had a whole set of what they
called secondary screens, and they skipped those.
“They just took it out in the field because it was getting late in the
season. If they wanted to get field studies done, they had to get them
out fast before winter set in. So they went right out in the field,
and it was very successful. So they knew by the end of the year that
it was likely to be commercial, that fast. Yes, it was amazing,
“The plant physiologist who took it out in the field was actually on a
plane coming to the test site when he saw the results on the ground.
He wrote a big ‘Eureka!’ over the top of the report. This was exciting
because it was a major objective in ag to discover a potent new
perennial herbicide; it was one of the major projects that they had
wanted to do by whatever means.”
No Researchers Wanted the Job
“Hamm was always hoping to be able to get a compound of at least
10-fold higher activity. For the next 9 years, from 1960 to 1969,
chemists kept cranking out these compounds and having them tested, but
they never could find anything better.
“Hamm kept testing the two compounds that were considered leads in the
field, trying to reformulate them and do other things that would
improve their activity, but he couldn’t get them up to the point where
they could be commercially interesting.”
How it Works
Franz admitted that what made glyphosate’s herbicidal powers active as
a herbicide was not well understood initially. Many years later,
German professor Dr. Nick Amrhein “found that glyphosate inhibits a
specific enzyme in plants that isn’t present in other living
organisms, with the exception of some fungi and bacteria. Glyphosate
is the only commercial herbicide known to inhibit the enzyme called
EPSP synthase (present in most plants). It’s very specific, and no one
really, today, still knows why,” he says.
“With most herbicide classes that we have today, you can make hundreds
of analogs with similar activity … but not glyphosate. Unbelievable.”
The other researchers all had their own projects
going, and here’s Hamm “coming around trying to beat them over the
head and put another thing on their agenda,” Franz says. “It turns
out, Phil was the type of guy who had hundreds of ideas, most of them
bad, but some of them darn good. He just spewed out these ideas, which
is good because he wasn’t biased by anything. But he couldn’t convince
any of the ag chemists to get interested in the phosphonic acid area
of chemistry.
“By 1969, they just about given up hope — at least, all the other
people had. Hamm always felt that in the phosphonic acid chemistry
area, there was something that was going to be commercial. He didn’t
know what, but somebody should keep working in that area, he thought.
He went around to various chemists and tried to get them interested in
this, and everybody rejected it. They thought, ‘Dead area! Don’t
bother me with this.’”
Franz joined the Ag Division in 1967, about the time the program was
dying out. “The first thing he did was nab me. I’d had all these other
projects going, but he did get me interested — maybe because I didn’t
have the biases that the other people had.” The newcomer agreed to
take a look and see if he could come up with any ideas.
Franz’ ideas involved other compounds that hadn’t been made and he
started some synthesis that was a “total failure.” Proceeding along
the same lines, he says, none of these other compounds was any more
active than the original ones.
![](images/images_07_20_2023/No-Till-Farmer-meetings-in-Hawaii.jpg)
The No-Till Farmer meetings in Hawaii not only
introduced farmers to the new no-till concept, but it also gave them a
look at glyphosate in 1974, 2 years before it would be approved for
use. Image From Maverick to Mainstream: A History of No-Till Farming
“By early 1970, I was about ready to terminate
that project, too, but something told me I ought to at least try it
from a different perspective. You know, try to think of some way to
approach the problem on a totally different basis than just a
chemistry synthesis viewpoint, which is the way chemists usually
operate.
“I started thinking in biological terms, instead of synthesis, and I
came up with this hypothesis: maybe the lead compounds were
metabolized by the plants to produce something common that was more
active.”
Franz wrote a hypothetical scheme, which he admitted didn’t look
promising, but he started making the metabolites, first with the
tertiary aminomethylphosphonic acids and then the secondary ones,
which no one at Monsanto had done before.
An Amazing 3-Peated
Discovery
According to Roundup history by Bayer, Dr. Phil Hamm was the head of
Monsanto’s herbicide screening program and was excited about two
compounds that were submitted from chemists in another Monsanto
division that were studied as water softeners. He asked the newly
transfered Franz to study them for herbicidal use.
Franz theorized that a beneficial compound might be produced during
the plant’s metabolic process, and if he was lucky, he might be able
to synthesize one of these compounds. In 1970, the third compound he
synthesized (glyphosate) would become the active ingredient in the
original Roundup formulation that would change the face of farming.
Franz recalled how he thought he’d made a new compound. “Monsanto’s
legal team did a more thorough search and found a patent issued to
Stauffer in 1961 for glyphosate relative to phosphonic acids. Stauffer
only saw its prospects as a descaling and metal chelating agent.
“Even though Stauffer was an agriculture company, they didn’t realize
that it had any herbicidal properties,” he says. “They never tested
it.”
So Stauffer (1960) had glyphosate 10 years before Franz and Monsanto
(1970), yet Franz also pointed to a third player who failed to
understand glyphosate’s capabilities. In 1950, glyphosate “was made at
an obscure pharmaceutical company called Cilag in Switzerland,” he
says. “Chemist Dr. Henri Martin made it as a possible antibiotic. When
they tested it and it didn’t work, they just put it in their chemical
storeroom.” Martin’s work was never published.
When Cilag went out of business, Franz says Alfred Bader of
Sigma-Aldrich purchased its research samples, including glyphosate,
and offered them for sale in the firm’s catalog of rare chemicals.
“Anybody could have bought this compound before I even made it.” Had
any samples been screened for herbicidal use, no-till could have seen
a better start than its plodding pace of just 3.3 million acres in its
first 10 years of commercial use.
After a series of great years to start the 1970s, Stauffer fell on
hard times and was sold to ICI in 1987. Meanwhile, by the late 1980s,
Monsanto was earning roughly $1 billion per year from Roundup alone,
Franz says.
He had 3-4 secondary acids in his scheme. The
first one he made was “deader than a door nail” and showed no activity
whatsoever.
Luckily for agriculture, Franz figured that was “par for the course”
and kept at it. “I was convinced I was going to complete the synthesis
of all the compounds that I had postulated from my hypothesis, so I
went on and made the next one.
“The second one was glyphosate, and yes, I was as surprised as
everybody else that it was really quite active. It was at least 10
times more active than the lead compounds, so that’s what started the
glyphosate program.
“The funny thing is, of all the analogs of glyphosate we’ve made since
then — every reasonable one we could think of — none of them are
active.”
QUOTABLES: Favorite Franz
Phrases
Dr. James J. Bohning’s 1994 interview with glyphosate herbicide
patentee John E. Franz of Monsanto was part of an oral history project
sponsored by the Society of Chemical Industry.
Here are 3 additional of the highlights from that interview:
3 Phases of Discovery. “It has been said that the reception of an
original contribution to knowledge may be divided into three phases.
First, it’s ridiculed as not true. Second, people say there may be
something to it, but it will never be of any practical use. Third,
when the discovery has received general recognition, there are people
who say that it is not original and has been anticipated by others, or
is obvious.”
Franz was talking about glyphosate, but the first two phases could
have applied to the no-till practice as well.
Joining the Ag Division. “I was given a project to work on plant
growth regulators, but I was just told to do whatever I’d come up
with. They didn’t assign me to anything specific. They said, ‘Work on
plant regulators, and let’s see what you can do.’ Of course, the first
thing I had to do was learn about plant growth regulation, which I
didn’t know anything about. I had to read some plant physiology and
biology books, study plants in the greenhouse, that sort of thing.
Then I started some programs on trying to make various analogs of
plant growth hormones and got involved in that research.”
Tackling the Task. “You know, when somebody discovers something like
glyphosate, in the beginning, they say, ‘What are you working on that
for? That’s already been worked on 9 years; you’re wasting your time.’
As matter of fact, when I went in to talk to my research manager ...
his response was, ‘Well, you’re a Fellow, you can do it, but you’re
just wasting your time. If you want to do it, it’s all right with me,
but it’s looking down a dead horse’s mouth. I can tell you; it’s just
going to be a waste of time.’”
Hypothesizing & Thinking Differently. “Why not make some secondary
products and see what they do?” That idea evolved out of the
hypothesis that metabolism might produce secondary amines. I don’t
know if I would have done it otherwise or not without the hypothesis.
But most things you do that are different are the result of hypotheses
that you have. Most of them are wrong, but that doesn’t matter; if it
instigates new experiments, that’s really the value of hypotheses.”
The No-Till History Series,
appearing throughout 2023, is supported by Montag Mfg. For more
historical content, including video/multimedia, visit www.No-TillFarmer.com/historyseries.
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