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Opinion and Comment

Nature Biotechnology 27, 504–505 (1 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/nbt0609-504b

Conflating MTAs and patents

Kevin E Noonan

To the editor: It is unfortunate that the paper by Zhen Lei, Rakhi Juneja and Brian D. Wright entitled “Patents versus patenting: implications of intellectual property protection for biological research” in your January issue obscures an important result with the red herring of “patents are bad for research.” Indeed, the piece records that a cohort of agricultural scientists from leading research schools have a subjective belief that patenting has a negative affect on research.