That paper simulated, and this is part of the story, simulated... a man in the States called Edward Lanphier who was a business development officer at one of the biotech companies, to set up a zinc finger company, you see they don't lose any time, these Americans. And he invited Yen Choo and myself to join the scientific advisory board. And I didn't know who he was. He wasn't a respected scientist, he was a... he had a degree in biology and so we rather pooh-hooh'd the idea you see. We underestimated him and I'll come to that later in the story as they figure prominently later. So we decided after that the next step would be to try to improve the affinity... improve the affinity and the specificity of our zinc finger constructs and there were two ways that you could do that. One was to change our phage display methods so we could take into account this... cross-contact interaction figure from position two to the second strand. And that required quite a bit of fancy engineering and this was solved by a student of mine called Mark Isalan, very bright fellow, top of the biochemistry class in his year, who came to... applied to me to work on zinc fingers because they'd got around. And he succeeded in doing that and the second thing we did was to try to extend the three fingers to six fingers and eventually to nine fingers. Now, other people had tried to do this and a group at the Scripps who had now jumped in, there were people all round the world now jumping into this, they spoil all the fun I must say, as you well know from your own experience. And of course, some people say a bit of competition is healthy but it is galling sometimes when they... it would be okay if they contributed to the subject, mostly they create a lot of noise, a lot of extraneous noise and diversion and you have to sort out the good stuff from the stuff which is rotten, as I said yesterday. You have to police the subject, you haven't got time to police and answer every bit of nonsense that's published, but there are some good papers in the field, of course I mustn't be too damning in all this there are some good...
[Q] Your scientific inquisition?
Not an inquisition. Well, because you know they make it difficult because people can't see what's being achieved because of this clutter. There's a lot of extraneous clutter. And you know very well how examples of molecular biology or any branch of science where this happens. So we decide to do this and I. Marcus and I recruited a man called Michael Moore.