Hello again, Dolly, as literary clones are sent in

Published on Thursday 16 March 2006 01:53

I HAVE decided to declare this the Week of the Researcher. It was Sir Jeremy Isaacs who alerted me to the unsung marvels of these neglected souls, whose work sustains the on-screen appeal of other talents. "The key to good documentary is research," he insisted. "I started as a researcher, and nobody outside television knew what that meant. They thought it must be market research and we wanted to know whether people preferred Persil to Daz. But we were doing basic journalism."

Well, I'm not the sort of person who would risk contradicting Sir Jeremy, but I seem to recall that Pamella Bordes was a researcher, and absolutely everybody realised that she hadn't the slightest interest in washing powder.

But it is not the achievements of Ms Bordes that I wish to applaud here. It is those of Blythe Brown, the power behind the pen of Dan "da Vinci" Brown. It was Mrs Brown who spent hundreds of hours digesting histories of the Knights Templar and trawling the internet for Holy Grail theories. These she would e-mail to her husband from a separate office, or leave neatly annotated on his desk, while the great man transformed the data into the best-selling novel of all time.

PERSONALLY, I'd like to recruit a whole battalion of researchers to discover why The Da Vinci Code achieved such astonishing sales. I hope they might uncover an equally thrilling conspiracy between Joseph of Arimathea and, say, the publishing magnate Lord Weidenfeld, his secret descendant. This, of course, would make it a great Jewish conspiracy, and not a Christian one, and the readers might miss a bit of papal pomp, but le chagrin et la piti of this new interpretation will far outstrip Dan Brown's melodrama when my researchers reveal that a second-rate Austrian painter called Adolf accidentally discovered that the blueprint for creating international bestsellers was locked in the vault of a Rothschild bank. This knowledge slowly drove him insane. He swore he would find the document or kill every Jew in Europe. In 1932, he began his long search ...

When my epic work is finally published, I'd like to think that Dan Brown will not sue me for plagiarism in the manner of Michael Baignet and Richard Leigh, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. They claim that Brown stole their research and conclusions, and would like a substantial slice of his fortune as compensation.

But should Mr Brown wish to sue, I have my defence ready. I intend to call it the Roslin factor. Because at much the same time as Dan Brown was sketching the family tree of Mary Magdalene and her husband, Jesus, and very close to the Roslin Chapel which figures so prominently in their dynastic tale, a different piece of plagiarism was unfolding.

IN MY own novel, I will cite The Boys from Brazil as a crucial link - in keeping with the Nazi strand of my story; but with or without the influence of this early exercise in fictitious cloning, Professor Ian Wilmut had begun to create life. Dolly the sheep, to be precise. The world's first cloned mammal. Though not cloned by Professor Wilmut, as it now turns out. Professor Wilmut told a tribunal that he had only a "co-ordinating" role in this massive scientific advance, and appeared as author of the paper about Dolly because of a prior agreement. Bill Ritchie, another of those golden researchers, had performed the experiments. Keith Campbell had devised the method.

Now, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: can it be mere coincidence that Roslin, an obscure former mining village, should be the link in these two cases? I think not.

When I visited Professor Wilmut at the Roslin Institute, it was during the foot-and-mouth outbreak, and I was required to walk through much disinfectant. I now realise this had little to do with animal safety. What Roslin was hoping to eradicate was the virulent plagiarism bug. And I can only say its efforts were tragically inadequate.

The disease has spread everywhere. Even the current spate of articles about plagiarism share most of their information.

But there is a solution - pioneered by the Irish author JP Donleavy. Plagiarise only yourself. Mr Donleavy appears to have written several novels. I can assure you he only ever wrote one: The Ginger Man. He then rewrote it under several different titles. And he was never, ever, tempted to sue.