THE first shots in the war to decide who 鈥渙wns鈥� the technology of cloning
have been fired. Two research groups last week clashed in print over scientific
details that may decide how the commercial spoils of animal cloning are
divided.
In a letter to Science (vol 281, p 1611), two of the creators of
Dolly the sheep, Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute and Keith Campbell of the
biotech firm PPL Therapeutics, both near Edinburgh, challenge the claim by a
competing group to have cloned cows by a technique that isn鈥檛 covered by the
Dolly team鈥檚 patents.
That claim came from a team of biologists led by Jim Robl of the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst and Steven Stice of Advanced Cell Technology in
nearby Worcester. In May, they published a paper in Science (vol 280, p
1256) describing the cloning of cows from actively dividing cells.
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Wilmut and his colleagues say that one of the keys to creating Dolly was
using cells in a phase called G0, a state of genetic slumber in which
they don鈥檛 divide and most of their genes are shut down. The team鈥檚 patents are
drafted to cover cloning using such quiescent cells.
The letter from Wilmut and Campbell disputes the Massachusetts team鈥檚 claim
to have used dividing cells. 鈥淚n fact, there is every reason to expect that
quiescent cells were present in the cultures,鈥� they write. 鈥淲e know that
quiescent cells work,鈥� Wilmut told 快猫短视频. He feels the onus is
on Robl and Stice to prove that their technique doesn鈥檛 depend on such
cells.
In a response published with Wilmut and Campbell鈥檚 letter, the American
researchers 鈥渃onsider it highly unlikely鈥� that they used quiescent cells, but
add that they are in the process of testing how common such cells were in their
cultures.
This outbreak of hostilities follows earlier sabre rattling. When researchers
at the University of Hawaii reported cloning mice
(This Week, 25 July, p 4), the
Roslin team quickly pointed out that the cells used were quiescent. But the
Hawaii team has filed its own patents, thought to concentrate on novel aspects
of its technique, including injecting nuclei from donor cells into eggs stripped
of their chromosomes, rather than fusing donor and egg cells.
With corporate money starting to pour into cloning, experts agree that
scuffles over intellectual property rights are likely to intensify. 鈥淲e know
there鈥檚 a lot at stake here,鈥� says Stice.