Little Johnny walked into the kitchen, saw his mother making a cake and announced, "I'll be playing in my room for the next two hours. I sure would like a piece of cake when you're finished."
Later, when his mother brought him a piece of cooled cake, Little Johnny exclaimed, "Golly, it worked!"
Puzzled, his mother asked, "What do you mean?"
Little Johnny replied, "Daddy said that in order to get a piece around here, you have to spend a couple of hours playing first!"
TaxolIn 1991, a patent was issued for the "Production of taxol or taxol-like compounds in cell culture" (No. 5,019,504). This miracle drug was an important break-through in cancer treatment. However, it only existed naturally in the bark of the Pacific Yew, Taxus Brevifolia, found solely in the Pacific Northwest, where the number of trees is limited. Further, a vast number of trees must be felled in order to collect the large amount of bark necessary for commercial drug production. Thus, clinical trials were limited by an extremely small supply of taxol. Alternatives, such as extracting taxol from yew needles, or to produce taxol synthetically, are source in the following years. Inventors Christen, Gibson and Bland assigned the patent the U.S. Dept of Agriculture. |
