 | Box 1
Nature Biotechnology
19, 86 - 87 (2001)
doi:10.1038/83595
The Nature Biotechnology 2001 New Year quizAaron Bouchie,
Natalie DeWitt, Emma
Dorey, Michael Francisco
, John Hodgson, Andrew Marshall
& Meeghan Sinclair | | | 
| Answers to quiz
1. (a) A vaccines manufacturing and distribution business, the polio component
of which fell under regulatory scrutiny when it was revealed that Medeva had
not fully complied with measures to avoid the use of BSE-tainted raw materials;
(b) Abgenix acquired both IntraImmune Therapies (Cambridge, MA) and ImmGenics
Pharmaceuticals (Pittsburgh, PA) in November; Aurora acquired Quorum Sciences
(Frederick, MD) in October and announced the acquisition of PanVera (Madison,
WI) in November.
2. The companies chosen were the top five in terms of raising money in
their particular funding stages. (a) PharmaMar raised $173.3 million; Zymogenetics
raised $150 million; DiadeXus raised $102.5 million; Orchid BioSciences raised
$72.0 million; and Coley Pharmaceutical raised $60.0 million; (b) Tannox raised
$244.2 million; Lexicon Genetics raised $220.0 million; ACLARA BioSciences
raised $217.4 million; Lion Bioscience raised $205.5 million; and Diversa
raised $200.1 million; (c) Celera raised $983.3 million; Human Genome Sciences
raised $948.8 million; Millennium Pharmaceuticals raised $797.8 million; Immunex
raised $795.0 million; and Abgenix $521.6 million.
3. (a) Apart from US presidential ballots, shuffling technologies have
been used to produce new carotenoids and to optimize viral vectors for purification
and target them to particular cell types; (b) rice engineered to produce provitamin
A (reported in the January 14 issue of Science by a group led by Ingo
Potrykus), and tomatoes, in which  -carotene content was increased threefold
(reported in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology by Peter Bramley
and colleagues). (c) Telomeres. Those from Dolly's cells seemed shorter than
those of other sheep of her age, yet telomeres from the cloned cows produced
by Advanced Cell Technologies appeared to be longer than parental cells. Indeed,
the life spans of isolated cells from the cows were 50% longer; (d) the names
of the first cloned pigs. Three different groups reported the production of
cloned pigs using differing approaches, Betthouser et al. in Nature
Biotechnology's October issue, Onishi
et al. in Science (August 18
), and Polejaevaet
al. in Nature (September
7) ; (e) Gene therapy was successfully used to treat two infants
with SCID-X1 (reported in April 28 issue of Science).
4. They are, respectively, husband and wife, Donald and Lisa Drakeman.
5.(a) Night-time gardening, or destroying genetically modified crops, according
to Tao Communications, an anarchist media organization that put a "how-to"
guide to GM destruction on its website; (b) Monsanto (St. Louis, MO); (c)
Triffids, a type of GM flaxseed that contains an inserted gene allowing growth
in the presence of sulfonylurea. According to its creator, Alan McHughen of
the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), the Triffid is far from indestructible
and is susceptible to all herbicides usually used to control the plant.
6. (a) A US federal court jury determined that Affymetrix had infringed
an Oxford Gene Technology patent. Affymetrix has licensed OGT chip technology
since June 1999, but the judge ruled that they infringed under doctrine of
equivalents for 17 months before that, though not willfully; (b) Amgen accused
Transkaryotic Therapies/Aventis Pharma of infringing five EPO patents. In
June, one was declared to not infringe, one was declared to not literally
infringe (but may under the doctrine of equivalents), and TKT and Aventis
gave testimony in September as to noninfringement of the other three patents
in question; (c) ACLARA BioSciences were ordered to pay Caliper $35 million
for misappropriation of microfluidics trade secrets, which ACLARA appealed
in December; (d) Lexicon's knockout technology. Deltagen is now countering
with an antitrust lawsuit, saying they don't infringe on the patent, and claiming
the patent is invalid based on prior art.
7. Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research,
was appointed to the board of directors of ACLARA BioSciences; Walter Gilbert,
who is Carl M. Loeb professor at Harvard University, was named to the board
of directors of Transkaryotic Therapies; Frances Arnold, who is professor
at Caltech, is a member of scientific advisory board of Maxygen; Sir Mark
Richmond, a senior fellow at University College, London, was appointed to
the board of OSI Pharmaceuticals; James Watson, president of Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory, was appointed to the board of DNA Sciences; and Janet Thornton,
head of the Joint Research School in Biomolecular Sciences, Birkbeck College,
London, continued as chief scientific officer of Inpharmatica.
8. (a) Ralph Nader, US presidential candidate, in Des Moines, IA on October
27, 2000; (b) Francis Collins at the HUGO meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada
on April 9, 2000; (c) Robert Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto, quoted in The New
Yorker magazine, April 10, 2000; (d) James Wilson, director of University
of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy, talking about UPenn clinical
trials (quoted in Technology Review magazine after comments at the
annual American Society for Gene Therapy meeting, June 1999); (e) James Watson
addressing Francis Collins after J. Craig Venter announced at a Cold Spring
Harbor meeting that Celera Genomics was going to sequence the human genome
by 2001 (quoted in The New Yorker magazine, June 12, 2000).
9. (a) Rosetta Inpharmatics, which alludes to the Rosetta stone linking
hieroglyphics and Greek, found in 1799; (b) Esperion Therapeutics, which is
a derivation of the Greek word encheirodion; (c) EpiGenesis Therapeutics,
which resonates with epigenetics and the Rosicrucians' teaching of Epigenesis;
(d) Eos Therapeutics.
10.(a) The US Department of Agriculture, which caved in to public pressure
when it released new proposed rules on the National Organic Program; (b) The
German Federal Ministry of Health, which shunned the 1997 conclusions of the
German Central Commission for Biological Safety and took advice instead from
the green-leaning Öko-Institut in Freiburg.
11. A criminal record. ChromaXome founder Dickman (aka "the Gap-Toothed
Bandit") appeared in court in February charged with six heists of California
banks. Snyder was sentenced to three years in prison at the end of August
for falsifying clinical trial data of a psoriasis and skin cancer treatment.
12. Pathogenesis (Seattle, WA). The move encouraged collaborations with
academics that identified virulence-related genes, for which the company subsequently
filed for patent.
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