The answer to corked wine

In 5 years we can all take resveratrol pills (instead of wine) and we won't have to deal with corked bottles.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/25/60minutes/main4752082.shtml

But do the pills come in bottles sealed with screwcaps? Or perhaps tucked into those handy little plastic thingies that hold sometimes 28 and sometimes 30 pills?

For popular science reporting, this article does a decent job. Of course, none of this is news per se and has been reported on (repeatedly) before. The only things I would add are that the resveratrol doages used in those studies are huge (corresponding to ~200 bottles of red wine per day) and when pure resveratrol is given to people, it gets modified in the liver to derivatives that are less active. (Curiously, the other constituents of red wine reduce the modification of resveratrol -- convenient!) Sirtris, the company that Westphal and Sinclair started, is testing a different molecule for use in human health (and not making any claims about life extension).

Mark Lipton
(Resveratrol researcher)

Mark,

Thanks for the info. Sinclair said you had to drink 1,000 bottles of wine per day to get the dosage they were testing. I think one of the big boys bought Sirtris for huge money.

Mark,

Thanks for the info. Sinclair said you had to drink 1,000 bottles of wine per day to get the dosage they were testing. I think one of the big boys bought Sirtris for huge money.

Yep, Glaxo-SmithKline for $750M. Not bad money, huh?

Mark Lipton

Does Harvard get any of that money? How does that work?

If you're a PhD doing research at xyz university and you discover something and start a company does the university benefit when you sell the company? Does the university own the research?

Does Harvard get any of that money? How does that work?

If you're a PhD doing research at xyz university and you discover something and start a company does the university benefit when you sell the company? Does the university own the research?

I don't know the specifics of how Harvard works it, but the likely answer to both questions is no. Sinclair formed the company to capitalize on discoveries made in NIH-funded projects. NIH rules, established in the wake of the '78 Stanford/Genentech brouhaha, give researchers and their host institutions the intellectual property for discoveries made using NIH funding (sweet deal, eh?) So Harvard probably gets royalties from key patents used in the business, but unless they provided seed money for the startup (which they may have done) they don't stand to gain anything from the sale of the company. As I say, though, I am ignorant of the specifics of this case.

Mark Lipton