Matthew R. Kaser, DPhil, earned his DPhil in biochemistry from Oxford University (UK) in 1988. After postdoctoral positions at the University of California, the University of Texas, and at REI Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, he was appointed to a faculty position at the University of California, San Francisco, Department of Pediatrics, then served as a scientist and patent agent at Incyte Genomics in Palo Alto, California, and a lecturer at California Sate University East Bay, Hayward. Dr. Kaser has been practicing as a patent agent since 1999, was associate director of intellectual property at Mendel Biotechnology, Hayward, and is a senior partner at Bell & Associates in San Francisco. He has presented research papers at a number of regional, national, and international conferences and coauthored more than a dozen publications. Gary C. Howard, PhD, earned his PhD in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University and The Johns Hopkins University and was a research assistant biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. He then joined Vector Laboratories in Burlingame as a biochemist and Medix Biotech (a subsidiary of Genzyme) in Foster City, California, as chemistry manager and operations manager. Currently, he is manager of scientific editing at The Gladstone Institutes, a private biomedical research institute affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco.