Stashed away somewhere in a freezer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a mouse embryo that Etienne Joly would dearly like to get his hands on. Joly is an immunologist based in Toulouse, France, with a keen interest in Rett syndrome, an incurable and debilitating disease that almost exclusively affects young girls. The mouse, developed by a team at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, carries a fluorescently tagged version of the gene that is mutated in the disease. It is the perfect tool, Joly says, for testing an idea he has about Rett syndrome. But a thicket of legal restrictions puts the mouse off-limits to anyone outside Novartis, even though scientists at the company are no longer using the model in their work on Rett syndrome.
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