Francis collins was in the middle of his keynote speech last July at the International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne, Australia when he arrested the audience with a rebuke singling out a local biotech firm. Collins, the force behind the mapping of the human genome and now the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, accused the firm of hijacking drug research with flimsy patents covering huge strips of so-called junk DNA, biological bits once thought insignificant but now central to the work of disease hunters. In the audience was a stunned Malcolm Simons. Cofounder of the accused firm, Genetic Technologies, he stood up and introduced himself as the author of the patents. He replied that his claims were deserved and cleared by the U.S. Patent & Trademark office. Simons, a 63-year-old immunogeneticist recently made bald by chemotherapy, sat down, a bit shaken. He says now: "That was a perverse comment. I was the first to realize that junk DNA is not junk."
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