Dr. Samuel Epstein, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health and chair of Cancer Prevention Coalition, Inc., reports that IGF-1, which causes cells to divide, induces malignant transformation of normal breast epithelial cells, and is a growth factor for human breast cancer and colon cancer. Yet rBGH was never adequately tested before the Food and Drug Administration allowed it on the market. A standard test of new biochemically produced products and animal drugs requires twenty four months of testing with several hundred rats. But rBGH was tested for only 90 days on 30 rats. This short term rat study was submitted to the FDA but never published. The FDA had refused to allow anyone outside that agency to review the raw data from this truncated study,
saying it would “irreparably harm” Monsanto.