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With apologies to Charles Dickens, whose 200th birthday was this week, it’s the best of times and the worst of times for Monsanto, the agribusiness giant that is aggressively marketing genetically engineered crops — and millions of tons of pesticides — worldwide.

It’s the best of times because its stock is soaring. Sure, the St. Louis-based leviathan has been up before — and down. In 2009, Forbes magazine proclaimed it company of the year. The next year its stock tanked, and Mad Money TV host Jim Cramer proclaimed it the worst of 2010. Now its up again, and last month Forbes was hyperventilating over the fact Monsanto has outperformed most high-tech stocks over the last five years.

But just like the plot in Dickens’ Great Expectations, Forbes’ rosy scenario is not the whole story.

You may vaguely remember the 19th century novel from high school English. According to a column in last Sunday’s Washington Post, its main lesson is: “You will never fully comprehend the most important events in your life while they are happening. Any plans you make will not work out — and you may grow up to be a jerk. If you are lucky, however, a series of traumatic events will wake you up and show you how insufferable you have become.”

If you replace the book’s protagonist Pip with Monsanto and look at the company through the prism of science instead of its stock profile, my tortured analogy makes sense. Despite more than 20 years of research and 15 years of marketing, Monsanto’s great expectation that genetic engineering would dramatically increase food production and reduce pesticide use has been dashed. Unlike Pip, however, the company has not yet woken up to the fact that its products don’t perform as advertised.

That’s why it’s also the worst of times.

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a molecular biologist with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), has spent quite a bit of time investigating Monsanto’s track record. In April 2009, he published “Failure to Yield,” the only comprehensive study to date that separates genetic engineering’s contribution from other factors that can increase yields. After reviewing two dozen academic studies of corn and soybeans — the two primary genetically engineered food and feed crops in the United States — he found that genetically engineered traits in herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn have not increased yields, and insect-resistant traits have improved corn yields only marginally. The substantial increase in yields for both crops over the previous 13 years was largely due to traditional breeding and better agricultural practices, not genetically engineered traits.