Thank you for your sincere apology. When I read your email addressed to
"Martha, Kathryn and Jay" I realized that you had meant the message to be
private and the public posting was an error. I believe that your comments
were most definitely sincere and well-intentioned, but meant for a private
audience. However, as it was posted publicly I need to respond to the
comment that our position is that "my chemistry is better than yours and
those of other companies".
It is important to Dharmacon and to me personally that the RNA services and
products that we provide are helpful to the research community. We insist
that people decide for themselves if the RNA technology we have developed is
of value to them. If one compares our technology with other RNA chemistries
or methods, like T7 transcription, and finds that ours is not the best for
the application, then we reccommend that you stay with the most suitable
method. One has to have confidence in the methods and technologies one
uses. When I give talks and presentations I make very few comparisons to
results with other chemistries. In fact, when we wrote our first paper on
this chemistry last year (Scaringe, S.A., Wincott, F.E. and Caruthers, M.H.
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 120, 11820-11821 (1998).), Marv Caruthers and I were
hesistant to make any comparisons at all to other RNA chemistries because
the purpose was to report on our chemistry, not comment on other
chemistries. However, it became obvious that we needed to include some
comparison so that one reading the paper would have a benchmark to which
they could compare the results.
Yes, we believe that our RNA oligo technology has significant advantages.
That is also the consensus of many prominent academic researchers
(http://www.dharmacon.com/ref.html#scientists). We started guaranteeing
high yields and quality because we repeatedly heard from customers and
collaborators that they were routinely observing considerably higher yields
of RNA oligos with our chemistry. People would report to us that they used
to get 40-100 nmoles of a purified 20-mer RNA from a 1 umole synthesis using
older chemistries. They then would get 100 nmoles purified from a 0.2 umole
scale using our chemistry. Many people do not even purify the RNA anymore
because it is so clean.
Thank you for the apology and for the opportunity to respond.
Sincerely,
Stephen Scaringe
Dharmacon Research, Inc.
Boulder, CO
At 02:43 PM 11/29/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear All:
>
>I offer my most humble apology to Dr. Steven Scaringe for sending my
>private comments about him in error to the whole ARBF list. The email was
>only intended for the three persons listed, but the wrong mouse click send
>it to ABRF instead. I hope Dr. Scaringe will forgive my carelessness.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Tony
>
>************************************
>Anthony T. Yeung, Ph.D.
>Director, Fannie E. Rippel Biotechnology Facility
>Member, Institute for Cancer Research
>Fox Chase Cancer Center
>7701 Burholme Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19111
>Voice: 215-728-2488 FAX: 215-728-3647 email: AT_Yeung@FCCC.edu
>Public Key: 4F3A 98D3 AC8B B56D A49B 4CD6 3057 376A 2951 68A4
>http://www.fccc.edu/research/labs/yeung/
>************************************
>
>
>