Craig moved on to cDNA, frustrated that he wasn't getting any money for sequencing. And so someone at NIH, Reid Adler was their lawyer, somehow he wrote up patents for all the cDNAs Craig had produced, many of which, you know, had no function whatsoever. I thought this is - so when I heard of this patent thing, I sort of, you know, said it was, you know, just bad and - but Bernadine Healy who'd become the director of NIH in consequence of George - yes, she became director of NIH sort of in 1990, because the first George Bush was President. And I had seen her earlier when she was all for regulating recombinant DNA and biotechnology and thought she was misguided, but I said, you shouldn't give a patent to something a monkey could do, so that led to another meeting where Craig appeared in a monkey suit. And then - and my pro-patenting, I mean, anti-patenting thing made some people uneasy with me 'cause they thought I was against America's competitiveness. So Bernadine essentially fired me and she could do it because, you know, I was still at Cold Spring Harbor and I had two jobs and I shouldn't have. It cost me $10,000 to resign because I had to get a high powered New York - Washington lawyer to see, you know that I wasn't being prosecuted for being sitting in my desk and doing it. And so I remember it was a pretty awful two days or something like this and - but one of our trustees had, oh, I can't now remember the name. He was almost, you know, the most prominent lawyer in Washington, but of course I didn't really see him, I saw an associate of his. And that happened in April of 1992. And about a year later, Francis Collins was appointed. He had found the CF gene. So I ceased to have any very active involvement in it. At the time I was fired, I had been in London just before going around to the MRC and to the Wellcome Trust with the hope that they would make a big commitment because to Sydney Brenner's, you know, annoyance or not annoyance but the MRC really didn't want to spend much money on the Human Genome Project. In fact, he was - Sydney had a small human genome project where he did his cDNAs, but it was all being done like it was basic science instead of big science. And if that hadn't, Sydney would have made all those cDNAs. And the MRC was run by Dai Rees. And the Wellcome Trust had just, I think Bridget Ogilvie was about to take it over. And they made the, you know, big decision that they would fund the British components of the - and the MRC was out. And that was just the time when the company had been sold to Glaxo, to Glaxo Wellcome. And so they were suddenly very, very rich.
