Here is the letter I emailed to Milberg Weiss in objection to their strike suit. If there ever was a time to wield a heavy hand against this type of abuse, and to exercise your "recommendation button" now is the time. Email this message, and recommend this post.

Do it for me, do it for this community.

ElricSeven

Please feel free to copy, change to suit your tastes and email to:

support@milberg.com

Here is the letter:

In objection to the class action against CRA, I would like to make the following four statements:

1) The announcement of the deal with the HGP falling through occurred the morning of the follow-on offer. It was in the public domain before the offer was occurring. After the offer, purchasers had ample opportunity to sell at a profit.

March 6, 2000
Intraday High: 255.9
Intraday Low: 229.1
Close: 247

Secondary Offering at a Price of $225 per share.
Article in the Washington Post about collaboration falling through.
Deadline for CRA to respond to HGP letter.

March 7, 2000
Intraday High: $254
Intraday Low: $205
Close: $215

Effect on the stock price? Looks like the intraday high was still much higher than the follow-on price. Boy, if the market is reacting to the news about the HGP it sure took its good old time - approximately 36 hours. It is the age of the Internet isn't it?

2) The entire biotechnology sector had become overheated on this date and, due to being overvalued, was rapidly turning south. CRA went with them, none of this had anything to do with the HGP potential collaboration, or the collaboration falling through.

3) No one bought CRA in anticipation of the collaboration being successful. The rocky nature of the collaboration had been publicized, as well as the rebuttal of CRA and Dr. Venter that the collaboration was unnecessary. It was only a goodwill gesture in the first place, the HGP database was open to be copied by CRA regardless of any collaboration. Therefore, the collaborative effort falling through had no effect on the viability of CRA as a business.

4) The purchasers of the follow-on offering had been duly warned of the unpredictable nature of the CRA business model with the following language:

There is intense competition among entities attempting to sequence segments of the human genome and identify genes associated with specific diseases and develop products and services based on these discoveries. Celera Genomics faces competition in these areas from genomic, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and diagnostic companies, academic and research institutions and government or other publicly-funded agencies, both in the United States and abroad. A number of companies, other institutions and government-financed entities are engaged in gene sequencing, gene discovery, gene expression analysis, positional cloning, the study of genetic variation, and other genomic service businesses. Some of these competitors are developing databases containing gene sequence, gene expression, genetic variation or other genomic information and are marketing or plan to market their data to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostic and other companies. Additional competitors may attempt to establish databases containing this information in the future. The Celera Genomics group has licensed some of its key technology on a non-exclusive basis, including the Human Genome Index licensed from The Institute for Genomic Research, and therefore such technology may be available for license by our competitors.

In closing, I would like to say that your attempts to appease the momentum based investing community does not impress the thousands of people who read the CRA message boards on several venues.

Save your strength for real wrongs to the investing community like the fiasco with Microstrategy. We, the investing community, would appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Gregory J. Carlin