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Smart and sexy
The author of "Fear of Flying" selects six novels for those who believe that the brain is the most important erogenous zone.
By Erica Jong
[08/16/99]

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"Crimes of War"
A mixture of reportage and legal discussion adds up to an encylopedia of evil.
By Akash Kapur
[08/16/99]

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"The Judge and the Historian"
Denouncing a miscarriage of justice, a historian compares Italy's courts to the Inquisition's.
By Jonathan Groner
[08/13/99]

Ivory Tower
My life ate my homework
Six years after that tremulous phone call, a guilt-ridden, longtime student confesses to his academic sins.
Eric Umansky
[08/13/99]

My "Outlander" thing
How a brainy guy like me wound up reading historical romance novels.
By Gavin McNett
[08/12/99]

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The implications of their announcement were enormous. Unlike the Scottish researchers who cloned Dolly the lamb but had been unable to repeat their feat, the UH team had cloned dozens of mice that were verifiably genetically identical. Until the breakthrough, cloning in mammals and other higher organisms had been unreliable to the point of being nearly random despite numerous past attempts by top-flight researchers and a few unverified claims of success.

The breakthrough garnered major coverage from virtually every news organization. Biological duplication vaulted from the realm of science fiction into the realm of hard fact. Possibilities ranging from growing human organs to restoring extinct animals as in "Jurassic Park" were touted. The three members of the team -- Yanagimachi, Anthony Perry and Teruhiko Wakayama -- attained a rarified level of academic superstardom.

A year later the trio continues its magical science tour. All three are hot properties on the science conference circuit and the two younger members, Perry and Wakayama, have been bombarded with lucrative job offers from other schools.

But on July 27 Perry sued the University of Hawaii over intellectual property rights to genetic manipulation techniques related to their cloning breakthrough. Perry claims he owns the patent rights to some of these procedures, which could be worth millions of dollars in the private sector. The university says anything that happens in UH laboratories is theirs and that Perry was well aware of this.

The case is one of a handful of recent high-profile disputes over who owns the creative energies of the best brains in science. In an era when, more than ever before, a single good idea can be worth many millions of dollars, when researchers float from one lab to another on visiting fellowships and the traditional tenure relationships in academia are increasingly tenuous, ownership of intellectual property is a hot topic indeed. "The university claims because you are sitting in a building, anything you think about while you are in this building belongs to them," explains Perry's lawyer, Jeffrey Harris. "They are saying, 'I own your mind.' We are saying we don't think that's true."

Next page | Laying the plans for an academic war zone?