Free Affidavit - District Court of Connecticut - Connecticut

Case 3:00-cv—00705-CFD Document 119-8 Filed 11/19/2004 Page 1 of 2
~ A Collins, Francis (NHGRI), 1/23/00 7:58 PM -0500, Phone call with Tony 'White » 1

From: "Collins, Francis (NHGRI)“
To: "'Martin Bobrow'" ,
"varmus, Harold (OD)" '
,
*‘Robert Waterston'“ ` ·· _
_ Subject: Phone call with Tony White
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 19:58:10 -0500 I
Hi Martin, Harold, and Bob, ` _ ·
· As you have heard, Ruth Kirschstein 0K*d our moving forward with the
current negotiating team, and sent a message to Craig Venter to that effect last U
Tuesday: ' __ _ ·
A "—l-——Original Message ----—
— From: Kirschstein, Ruth (OD)
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2000 6:51 PM ’ -
To: ‘[email protected]'U . -
Subject: V A
Dear-Craig,
After careful study, I have determined that the group of individuals who
have been meeting with you and your colleagues are representing the
international human genome sequencing effort and not any one organization. i
Therefore, the NIH cannot unilaterally decide who should or should not attend _
those meetiings. You will be hearing from Francis reprsenting the group about
another meeting
Ruth ` [ · _ »
Accordingly, I called Craig. He was in Board meetings, and then I was told he _
was leaving the country and would not have time to call. I was instructed to
call Tony White —- and subsequently spoke to him for more than_an hour on
Saturday. ·
My goal in the phone call was to explore possible dates for a second ;g
_face—to—face meeting, not to get involved in any actual negotiations. But Tony ,
was in a bearish mood. He was upset about an article in the Jan. 20 Nature
` (which I have still not seen), and not at all convinced that there was any point
- in another meeting. He said such a discussion would only make sense if the
public consortium could be made to understand the need for Celera to gain
· commercial protection for the sequence in their database well beyond the time it . _ _
_ would have taken us to generate an equivalent product. He would expect at least . _
3 to,4 years; and preferably_longer. »He also held fast to the demand that ` V' .
` A .finishing efforts by`the public consortium,_carried—outrafter the merge, would _ .
n V. need to be under the same restrictions. I pointed out that this was V . ‘ A"'
particularly puzzling, since if there were no collaboration we could presu ably `
*¤_ use their DVD to aid finishing and then place those additional reads in public
E databases. He indicated that they were rethinking their DVD plans, and that the I `
sequence data might only be available on their web site, perhaps with some
V restriction on this sort of finishing activity by others. V ·
I asked about the extent to which Celera would see their restrictions applying
to uses of the genome sequence other than commercial databases, and he ,
reiterated that they would expect chip companies to pay a license for this use.
He expressed anger that Affymetrix is planning to market a Drosophila genome
chip (though I can hardly see how this is inappropriate, since the data is in
GenBank), and says that Celera has "a surprise" for them (which he would not .
further reveal). As to other genome-wide uses of the human sequence, he said
that Celera has not yet defined which types of experiments would require a
1 license, but left the door open to that being broader.than just chips. V .

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Case 3:00-cv—00705-CFD Document 119-8 Filed 11/19/2004 Page 2 of 2
i Collins, Francis (NHGRI), 1/23/00 7:58 PM -0500, Phone call with Tony White 2-

I expressed the hope, from the public side, that the stipulations he had 1 '
outlined on Dec.- 29 were opening positions, and that there was some continued
` flexibility. He did not particularly encourage that view. He continues to .
_ 1 argue that a collaboration doesn‘t give Celera very much. ' 7
So in my view we are Aquite close to arriving at a conclusion that no . 1
collaboration can be achieved. But if that is the case, I want us to be -
absolutely sure why. I asked Tony to write dovm a set of bullets describing the
Celera position, so that we could be sure we understood them, and he refused —-
arguing that they would probably appear in next week's Nature. I made it quite P ` ‘
· clear that I did not feel comfortable representing the views of you three, and 1
that you might have your own set of questions. After some discussion, he did _
agree to- another conference call between the public negotiating team and Celera. ' 1
I suspect that Martin is not reading. e—mail this week. I will try to set up a
phone call for the following week. Meanwhile, I will inform the G5 of the_
I nature of this conversation in next- Friday's conference call, unless you think
that is a bad idea. If collaboration is not to be possible, we must still
pursue the possibility of a cooperative effort which would at least attempt to
reduce animosities and coordinate publications -- though the latter may not be
easy. Your thoughts on this would be much appreciated. ·
Francis
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