Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 544–546 (2010); published online 7 June 2010; corrected after print 9 July 2010

In the version of the article originally published, it was stated that the Cohen-Boyer patents generated hundreds of billions of dollars in licensing revenue. It should have read hundreds of millions of dollars. The error has been corrected in the HMTL and PDF versions of the article.