Collins, Francis (NHGRI), 1/23/00 7:58 PM -0500, Phone call with Tony White 1
Fro : "Collins, Francis (NHGRI)"
To: "'Martin Bobrow'"
"varmus, Harold (OD)â€
“‘Robert Waterston'“
Subject: Phone call with Tony White
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 19:58:10 -0500
Hi Martin, Harold, and Bob, _
As you have heard, Ruth Kirschstein OK'd our moving forward with the
current negotiating team, and sent a message to Craig Venter to that effect last
Tuesday: _
----— Original Message -—-—-
From: Kirschstein, Ruth (OD)
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2000 6:51 PM
To: ‘[email protected]'
Subject:
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.
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
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 ga-n
commercial protection for the sequence in their database well beyond the time it l _
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
finishing efforts by the public consortium, carried out after the merge. would
need to be under the same restrictions. I pointed out that this was
particularly puzzling, since if there were no collaboration we could presumably
use their DVD to aid finishing and then place those additional reads in public
databases. He indicated that they were rethinking their DVD plans, and that the
sequence data might only be available on their web site, perhaps with anne
restriction on this sort of finishing activity by others.
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 tmis 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 wouli not i
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
license, but left the door open to that being broader than just chips.
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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
outlined on Dec. 29 were opening positions, and that there was some continued
flexibility. He did not particularly encourage that view. He continues to
argue that a collaboration doesn't give Celera very much.
So in my view we are quite close to arriving at a conclusion that no
collaboration can be achieved. But if that is the case, I want us to be
absolutely sure why. I asked Tony to write down 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
clear that I did not feel comfortable representing the views of you three, and
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.
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
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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