The mouse that trolled

As one of the actors in the mouse trolling drama detailed in Bubela, Vishnubhakat and Cook-Deegan (2015),1 I might say that, although I was not aware of this or contacted by the authors before publication, I am in complete agreement with their paper and its conclusions. Hindsight is always 20/20 vision and it is clear that many people, including me, made many mistakes in the prosecution of intellectual property deriving from the finding of APP and later presenilin mutations. It is not clear to me that patenting genetic discoveries helps progress toward disease treatments and additionally, it is difficult to face family members with pathogenic mutations when one has patented for profit, ‘their’ mutation. We were told by our university employer in 1990 to patent APP mutations with the consequences detailed in the paper by Bubela and colleagues. In 2013, we found mutations in TREM2 which also lead to Alzheimer's disease. With this saga in our rear view mirror, we did not patent these more recent mutations.