It took about a month for mass media, including WSJ and Science, to agree with Poodle about HGSI "HIV" patent. Nice, but latest cascade of events created a lot of myths and misunderstandings.
1. PR was misleading. It depends.
Traders purchased the stock immediately after they looked at the headline. If FIFO method worked, they made good profit. Were they misleaded?
Fundamentalists (if this category still exists):
PR provided more than enough information: CCR5 name, application, and even patent number. A lot more information than many other biotech PRs.
Someone who was interested in biomed research could remember the story around CCR5.
If you did not, but was curious to know, no problem.You could search:
1. OMIM and get complete review with History.
2. Pubmed, and get all relevant abstracts
3. GenBank and find all relevant entries with links to medline.
4. Patent Office and read patent.
Any of these links would provide immediate answer.
All searches are free, easy, and information is very reliable. You could complete this job in 20 min. Market had days.
Finally, from the common sense, role of the protein in AIDS could be determined by the type of clinical and biomedical research that HGS has not been involved in.
PRs can't mislead someone who does not read. Nor it could mislead someone who knows or wants to know. Someone in between is targeted: "investors" who consider PR as reliable information; and the only source of it.
PR was written very well, no any directly wrong statement. Wording, indeed, is perfect. Congratulations to someone who wrote it. Highly professional job.
Myth 2.
Clinton's comments were unpredictable, wrong, poorly timed and almost destroyed Biotech industry.
"Clinton took locks from the corporate safes with hard-earned proprietary information to put it on guns. Biotechnology progress is b-locked now because neither shot gun sequencing, nor gene gun transfer can be performed.
-What are you smoking?
Yes, yes, and because of his policy some journalists had to quit smoking tobacco and started to smoke..."
Well, Clinton's comments could be unpredictable for someone who did not bother to read HGS PRs at least. For someone, however, April 1 may come unexpectedly.
Feb 11:
Haseltine is responding to Clinton comments:"`The President is dead right in opposing broad patents of the human genetic code."
Feb 15.
Patent 6,025,154 issued
Don't you think that Clinton comments had particular reason and address?
Feb 16.
"HIV" PR issued.
March 6.
A one-week "ultimatum" from US-UK team to Celera expired.
Ventor "have been entirely unavailable travelling", but it did not prevent Clinton-Blair meeting <G>.
Looks like date and spirit of the joint statement were perfectly predictable. And Clinton and Blair did exactly what they promised to do, and, probably, what they should do.
Did statement ruin the industry?
What was in this statement to begin with? Can anyone find the text? It would be very helpful.
Media responded to several Clinton's phrases, and they seems to be well overanalyzed.
For example, after saying that Human Genome Project will release data every 24 hours, he said:
"I urge all of the nations, scientists and corporations to adopt this policy and honor its spirit".
Was it the basis for the rumour: all private databases should become publicly available?
Such readings sounds rather strange. Let's look what one of the leading UK genomic scientists (have you seen non-genomic scientists? <G>)said. Looks like he was involved in agreement preparation.
Dr Sulston said that Celera "hoover up all the public
data, add a bit of their own and sell it as a packaged
product. It is fair enough if people want to buy it. That's
up to them."
So locks on private databases will not be broken and if Celera, for example, may sequence genome 2 years ahead of public efforts, may be someone will pay. However, about 16% of human genome is already in public databases. So everyone who believes that genomic data can lead directly to drugs and profits is very welcome to go ahead. Free. |
