"It would appear that the Med Immune antibody had better characteristics than the Repligen one," said Denise Gilbert, an analyst at Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company.

In 1915, Arthur Felix and Edward Weil discovered that Proteus OX19 reacted to the same human immune antibodies as typhus and so developed the Weil-Felix test for typhus and other rickettsial diseases.

The result of this rearrangement was to free the myc gene from the conventional chromosomal signals that kept it in check, and instead to expose it to other, more robust genetic switches, particularly the one that assured the ceaseless production of immune antibodies.