I worked for a very well known company who licensed some of the early genes that were patented by companies like Celera. It was such a painful experience and th

I worked for a very well known company who licensed some of the early genes that were patented by companies like Celera. It was such a painful experience and the arrangement caused tons of legal knots years later. When the license period ended I distinctly remember an email asking that in addition to surrendering all documents related to the genes, we had to "forget" anything we might have learned personally about them. By that time they were all publicly known, so it was a bit hard to tease out what was learned as a result of the patented genes vs. what you learned from a search at NCBI.