Patent applications do not require any actual working technology, they only require the ability to, perhaps speculatively, describe a technological process in sufficient detail. I think that the "submit a working model" requirement is only pulled out when someone submits something that appears to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. So, patents and preliminary papers aside, I still fail to understand why someone with a viable RNAi technology would be wasting time on corn rootworm as their first application. I will quote one of my own prior postings to Bee-L when we were speaking of IAPV: "And if Beelogics [Monsanto] has anything even close to a viable anti-viral, why would they focus the technology on bees, when one might focus on more serious and far more profitable problems than IAPV, such as HIV-AIDS, H1N1, Hepatitis-C, Hepatitis-B, West Nile, Rotavirus, HPV, Rift valley fever, Measles, Hantavirus, Rabies, Yellow fever, and Dengue? I can see bees as a good testbed for very early stages of a semi-working technology, as IRBs will prohibit human testing and painstakingly review animal testing, but approve insect testing with only a cursory review. But no one has put the tangible status of the anti-viral technology into perspective for us." Is corn a more profitable market than all the human diseases above? Is no one at Monsanto/Beelogics interested in a Nobel Prize in medicine? Or is the technology far too shaky for human use, and agriculture is a testbed? Not sure I like that idea. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html