Home > Media releases > 2000

$1 MILLION DONATION FOR ACADEMY DOME FROM SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
12 April 2000

Eminent scientist, Professor John Shine, has donated $1 million to refurbish the Australian Academy of Science Dome in Canberra. The donation, part of a $20 million legal settlement, is the result of an intriguing story of scientific discovery and an argument over intellectual property rights.

In 1975 Shine had just completed his PhD at the Australian National University where he had discovered the genetic code that signalled bacteria to synthesise particular proteins. He had a CSIRO Postdoctoral Scholarship and had been offered research positions in Berlin, Boston and San Francisco.

He chose the University of California in San Franscisco. Looking back, California in the 1970s was a great place and time to be doing genetic engineering. In the next three years Shine developed new genetic techniques, cloned a human hormone gene (he was the first to do so) and, with colleagues Peter Seeberg and Howard Goodman, cloned human growth hormone.

Human growth hormone is used to treat dwarfism and other growth disorders in children. It used to be extracted from the crushed pituitary glands of dead people but, in the early 1980s, the extracts were found to cause Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease.

Biotechnology companies such as Genentech picked up the new genetic techniques to produce a safe, identical hormone in almost unlimited quantities. They started selling human growth hormone in the mid-1980s. Today the worldwide market is worth billions of dollars a year, with further applications for adults being explored.

The University of California held patents over the technology, with Shine and his colleagues named as inventors. The biotechnology companies were asked to pay royalties. They refused. The university began legal proceedings.

The case was finally settled at the end of 1999, with a large sum going to the University of California and smaller amounts going to the inventors of the human growth hormone technology.

Professor Shine said today, 'I feel that some of that should go back into recognition of the importance of fundamental research for our future and to improving human health and quality of life. Without research into human growth hormone, there would be no treatment for over 100 000 children. I see this as giving something back to science.'

Professor Shine is now Executive Director of the Garvan Institute in Sydney and Professor of Medicine and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of New South Wales. He has won many medals and honours and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1994.

The donation from Professor Shine will be used to refurbish the Australian Academy of Science Dome, which was designed by Sir Roy Grounds and built in 1959. This donation is in addition to the $525 000 provided by the Federation Fund. The Dome will be closed for renovation from 5 May this year and will reopen in January 2001.