I found Don Luskin's (and Dave Nadig's) thoughts on fetal brain-cell implants interesting. Don makes a point about investor psychology that is quite reasonable. Gabe Hoffman did a very entertaining refutation in the RealMoney.com Columnist Conversation that managed to describe what really happened without disgusting all interested parties. Our guys thrashed out the argument and that was that.

Don's point that investors would punish Geron (GERN:Nasdaq - news - boards) as the best-known stem cell company is not an unreasonable statement. But an unhappy reader said this whole thing was unfair to Geron and asked me to weigh in on the topic.

To Don's point: I think Geron would have been hit hard a year ago on this news even though it's a bystander and doesn't deserve to be pummeled.

But that was then and this is now. Geron's no longer at $72 (it's at $14+ and has been about that since December). The fluff's out of the stock and many of the holders at these levels owned it before the stock surged, starting in late 1999. They know what they own and they're not easily rattled.

So what do they own? The premier company in telomerase, embryonic stem cell and nuclear transfer intellectual property. Telomerase mends the ends of chromosomes and could be one key to immortality if we humans could figure out how to harness it. You've already read about embryonic stem cells in Don's discussion, and nuclear transfer refers to taking the chromosomes from one creature and tucking them into the egg of another. (First you vacuum out the egg's original chromosomes, though we haven't yet figured out how to clean out the mitochondrial DNA and still keep the cell alive...)

Anyway, Geron's a package deal. The company doesn't own all of the intellectual property rights (read "patents") to any of these technologies -- but it owns a whale of a lot of them. This will give Geron a lot of negotiating room in the future when the cross-licensing deals start to fly -- which I guarantee they will.

What you've been witnessing in biotech over the past few decades is a land grab of mammoth proportions. And it didn't start or end with the human genome. Companies that have valuable intellectual property to barter will survive and thrive in this century. Companies that don't will die.

Simple as that.

And Geron has one of the most amazing intellectual property portfolios in all of biotech.

Forget the fact that it's dealing with an immortality enzyme and targeting cancer, with something like 300 labs around the world using its telomerase kits. Forget that Celera Genomics Group (CRA:NYSE - news - boards) made a deal for Geron's embryonic stem-cell data. Forget that Geron has heart and liver cells growing in its labs. (That's an achievement of such scientific magnitude, words fail me!)

Forget even the fact that Geron bought Roslin Bio-Med --- the nice Scottish folks who brought you Dolly the sheep. And Geron did this partly because it foresaw problems with stem-cell research if the federal government lowers the boom on such research. (Also because a lot of other teams have stem-cell intellectual property rights, etc.)

Dudes, the scientists at Geron are some of the best in the world; I've watched them in action for nearly nine years. It's been said that if you nuked one of their scientific advisory board meetings, you'd knock off half of the top genomics researchers in the world. (Go look at the Web site. You'll see.)

Geron has survived the fear that telomerase will actually cause cancer if given to humans. It has survived the recurring droughts of funding for biotechnology companies. And it will survive this. Without blinking.