May 12, 2000 / Science / Volume 288, Number 5468 Issue of 12 May 2000, p 973 / Floyd Bloom
When U.S. President Reagan signed Executive Order 12591, in April 1987, to
ensure that Federal agencies and laboratories would assist universities and
the private sector by moving new knowledge from the research laboratory into
the development of new products and processes, the Federal Laboratory
Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) was also created to promote
technology transfer nationwide and now includes more than 600 major Federal
laboratories and their agencies. Technology transfer, says Bloom,
encourages the sharing of information. For government and private-sector
inventors to succeed with technology transfer, there must be an economic
incentive for both sides and protection of commercially sensitive
information.
Bloom says that examples abound of important commercial product spin-offs
from government efforts, including improved airframe and auto design, a
superinsulating aerogel, new tooling methods for composite materials, and
rapid molecular identification of toxic bacteria (see
flc2.federallabs.org/).
Rights and protections for owners of intellectual property are based on
federal patent, trademark, and copyright laws and state trade secret laws.
Bloom says that federal laboratories active in technology transfer must be
familiar with the laws and policies concerning intellectual property, to
better advise participants of their rights and opportunities. A search of
the IBM
Intellectual Property Network Web site (www.patents.ibm.com) under patents
for "Genetic engineering: recombinant DNA technology" lists some 369 issued
patents for specific genes on claims as broad as "unique genes on chromosome
16" to very specific genes and their products.
Rice, arguably the most commonly consumed food source in the world, is eaten
by 3 billion people daily. Rice crops account for about 10% of the arable
land mass. The rice genome is estimated at 500 million base pairs, with some
40,000 genes over 12 chromosomes. Agricultural developers around the world
are anxious to identify those genes that could improve rice yields on
marginal soils and provide greater disease and pest resistance, shorter
maturation times, and a wider range of tolerable climates. Rice is important
not only in its own right but also as a model for improving other grain
crops because wheat, rye, barley, maize, sorghum, millet, and rice have
similar genetic maps. The International Rice Research Institute estimates
that by 2020, 4 billion people -- more than half of the population then -- will
depend on rice as a food.
Bloom says that in September 1997, participants from 10 western and Asian
countries agreed to participate in an international collaboration to
sequence the rice genome. Participants explicitly agreed to share materials,
including
libraries, and to the timely release to public databases of physical mapping
information and annotated DNA sequences. By this winter, after expenditures
in the participating countries of more than $200 million, about 10% of the
rice genome had been mapped. In April, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), speaking on behalf of the International Rice
Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP), announced that a contract from Monsanto
to the laboratory of Leroy Hood at University of Washington in Seattle had
derived a "working draft" covering 85% of the rice genome. Monsanto will
provide its rice sequence files, as well as the tools used in the process of
its sequencing, to the IRGSP participants. Monsanto will also make the
sequence information publicly accessible at its own Web site for researchers
who register with the company. Those who make use of its data are encouraged
to publish their results for the research community, but under the terms of
the registration, if researchers seek to patent inventions based on direct
use of Monsanto's sequence data, the company is to be given an early
opportunity to negotiate a nonexclusive license to such patents.
The MAFF described this rice initiative as "the first time a private
enterprise will share a large volume of genome information globally...The
initiative is to be highly applauded." Bloom says that Science agrees. As we
noted in March with the Drosophila "Release I" data, this spirit of
cooperation benefits society, the governmental agencies charged to conduct
the work, and the commercial operators eager to push the results into
strategies for genetic modification. Cooperation between publicly funded and
commercially funded efforts is good for the taxpayer, yielding quicker
results based on the government investment. Let's see if this all works out
as well as it looks.
(posted without permission)
