University of Pittsburgh 
SCHOOL OF MEDICINE 
Department of Biochemistry 
June 30, 1976 
Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson, Director 
National Institutes of Health 
Bethesda, Maryland 
Dear Sir: 
According to Nature magazine of June 24, 1976, a patent is being sought 
by the University of California and Stanford University on the procedures 
and ideas of genetic manipulation by recombinant DNA. The decisions 
of the NIH and the Recombinant DNA Molecule Program Advisory 
Committee may thus be short-circuited by placing legal control in the 
hands of private rather than public institutions, a prospect which I 
find alarming. 
According to Nature, ". . . the patent is understood to be worded broadly 
enough to cover commercial uses of any method of transporting genes 
from one organism into another. 11 While I know very little about the 
legal aspects of patents, it is my understanding that if an idea is common 
knowledge, it cannot be patented. The idea of recombinant DNA dates 
back many years before the 1973 and 1974 experiments of Cohen and 
Boyer. 
As evidence of this, in late 1967 or early 1968 I submitted a postdoctoral 
grant application to the NIH, which was funded as I recall by General 
Medical. This application was a proposal to create recombinant DNA 
molecules by the use of terminal transferase to add A residues and T 
residues to the fragmented half molecules of lambda and to a piece of 
foreign DNA, to then anneal the fragments and to close the gaps with 
polymerase and ligase to create a new viral DNA molecule containing 
the foreign DNA. 
This experiment was in fact never done by myself since Dean Rupp and I 
became interested in the mechanism of replicative transfer of DNA 
(Ihler and Rupp, PNAS 63, 138, 1969) which in turn ultimately led to my 
devising a procedure for the isolation of the lactose gene by reverse 
orientation (Shapiro jet al. , Nature 224, 768, 1969). This terminal 
addition procedure however was successfully done by others several 
years later. 
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PITTSBURGH, PA. 15261 
