San Diego

How much is academic research worth? For lab work that took nearly three years and produced papers in Science and Biochemistry the value is one US dollar, according to a California appeals court.

The ruling covers a lengthy battle over research on the rat DNA enzyme polymerase-β, which was taken by La Jolla-based drugs company Agouron Pharmaceuticals from a federally funded laboratory at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).

Last month, the state appeals court in San Diego upheld a 1998 jury verdict that in 1992 Michelle McTigue and her husband Jay Davies, both of Agouron, stole key elements of crystallography research from Huguette Pelletier, then a postdoc at UCSD (see Nature 393, 504; 1998). But the court reduced the jury's $200,000 award to Pelletier to $1, ruling she had not proved any damage.

Formerly a crystallographer at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, Pelletier left science last year, largely in frustration over the incident. She now works for a Los Angeles community-service organization.

Pelletier: will appeal against the verdict.

The decision highlights the dilemma faced by university scientists trying to protect their research from the representatives of biotech companies who walk round university labs seeking leads to develop into products.

Pelletier will appeal to the California Supreme Court against last month's verdict. She hopes to create a legal precedent affirming the value of academic research.

She has written to the Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, asking him to file documents with the California Supreme Court on the value of academic research and the damage caused by scientific misconduct.

“It is difficult under existing laws to place a dollar value” on research such as Pelletier's, says her attorney, Daniel MacLeod. The $200,000 originally awarded was based on a year's grant from the National Institutes of Health, which funded the lab where she worked at UCSD.

Academic scientists who are victims of this sort of practice have to seek redress under laws designed for misappropriation of commercial and patented data, MacLeod says. And as the reward system for academic researchers involves a range of factors, including publication and academic promotion, he adds, it is difficult to demonstrate damage.

Mike Varney, vice-president for research at Agouron, now owned by the drugs company Pfizer, issued a statement saying that the company “continue[s] to fully support the integrity of our scientists and the appropriateness of their conduct.”

Pelletier filed her lawsuit in 1994. She contended that McTigue, a former doctoral student at UCSD, used her access to the university to secure techniques on crystallography on rat polymerase-β. These were then given to Davies for his Agouron project to try to develop a cancer medication from the enzyme, which repairs DNA.

The project was eventually abandoned. But Davies, McTigue and others used the data for the first publication of the rat polymerase-β crystal, which appeared in Cell in 1994. Pelletier's work on polymerase-β was later published in Science and Biochemistry.