I am struck by how the legal system is so meandering and inconclusive. Take the issues raised by Internet search ads. Company A is angry because when a consumer enters its trademarked name into Google's search engine, it acts as a trigger for the display of ads for Company B and Company C.

Despite the fact that this has been going on for years, there hasn't been a satisfying resolution of the issue. Lower courts have come to different decisions as to whether this constitutes trademark infringement.

What's more, for whatever reasons, companies fighting Google have given up. Michigan--based American Blind and Wallpaper Factory, which was the target of a summary judgment complaint by Google, gave up its case in September; its CEO said it couldn't afford to pay the mounting legal bills.

Then there is the big insurer Geico, which settled with Google in 2005. Today if you enter Geico into a Google search, the screen screeches with emptiness, free of the ads that adorn most search results. Apparently, Geico reached its own separate peace with Google when it dropped its suit. But that doesn't do anything at all from a legal point of view for the other companies that feel they are subsidizing their competitors through Google's practice. We'll all be watching now that American Airlines has stepped up, suing Google in August.

In this issue, we chart another unsatisfying trip through the legal system. The issue at hand is biomedical research, and what are the patent rights of inventors who develop tools--e.g., assays, reagents, or antibodies--that are used by others in the course of developing a drug. Litigator Patricia Thayer of Heller Ehrman, who defended Merck KGaA from patent infringement claims by Integra LifeSciences, describes how 11 years of litigation left many important questions still unanswered.

A legal philosopher I'm not. I guess what Winston Churchill said about democracy in general holds for our legal system: It's "the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried from time to time." Certainly law, like science, takes patience and perseverance. I am very happy to feature in this issue's cover story Tyler Dylan (both a scientist and a lawyer) of Cardium Therapeutics, a San Diego company that has been working away at a gene therapy for heart disease for nearly a decade--even when the field fell sharply out of fashion. As staff writer Xenia P. Kobylarz discovered, Cardium's therapy may turn out to be the first gene therapy approved in the United States. Let's hope that he--and we--finally reach a satisfying conclusion: FDA approval of the drug.

Pamela Sherrid
Editor