The second significant event was the establishment of the biotechnology industry which developed between 1974 and 1980, during this period of litigation. So this... the Chakrabarty decision was very favorable to us because it for the first time said that a scientist, regardless of their employer, has... can patent their discovery. They may not own it ultimately, but they can patent it, and in Chakrabarty's case, of course, Monsanto owned it.

In my case, it's still... it was not then decided. So the second event that occurred was, as I say, the establishment of the biotechnology industry, where scientists like myself who had government grants or contracts would, in their government-supported laboratories, invent an isolated gene that would produce a useful product like growth hormone and insert it into a bacterium or a cell and then put that culture – it's a small culture, you can put it in a test tube or in a little ampule – put it in your shirt pocket, go down the street, rent a garage, and found a company like Genentech, Amgen, Cetus. All these start-up companies were begun in that way.

Well, I never did anything as outrageous as that. I mean, here these people are taking a potential multimillion, maybe billion-dollar product that sits in a little test tube, go down the street, and open a company. I mean, I didn't come close to being accused of that. So when the... when those companies learnt about my lawsuit, they immediately sent their attorneys to my attorneys to say, 'If Hayflick loses his case, we're dead, we're finished.'

And they said, 'We will file amicus briefs on Hayflick's behalf if and when his case goes to court', in other words: we'll file statements saying we agree with him that there are four stakeholders and the stakeholders have to be considered. So that was the second major thing that happened.