I hate the fact that breakthroughs like this are patentable.<p>People need to follow Alexander Flemings lead:<p><pre><code> The pharmacist Sir Alexander Fleming is revered not just
because of his discovery of penicillin – the antibiotic
that has saved millions of lives – but also due to his
efforts to ensure that it was freely available to as much
of the world’s population as possible. Fleming could have
become a hugely wealthy man if he had decided to control
and license the substance, but he understood that
penicillin’s potential to overcome diseases such as
syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis meant it had to be
released into the world to serve the greater good. On the
eve of World War II, he transferred the patents to the US
and UK governments, which were able to mass-produce
penicillin in time to treat many of the wounded in that
war. It has saved many millions of lives since.
</code></pre>
<a href="http://www.mobileworldlive.com/blog/penicillin-the-antidote-to-patent-wars/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mobileworldlive.com/blog/penicillin-the-antidote-...</a>
This is part of an ongoing dispute between Jinek et al at Berkeley and Zhang et al at the Broad Institute. Both groups did important work on CRISPR-CAS9, and now they're fighting over credit, a patent, and (probably) a Nobel prize. Eric Lander, head of the Broad Institute, recently published an article "The Heroes of CRISPR" which emphasizes his own institution's role and downplays Berkeley's. Michael Eisen, a professor at Berkeley, wrote this article to emphasize Berkeley's role and downplay Broad's. Lander has, apparently, been in a fight like this before, with Craig Venter's group over credit for being first to sequence the human genome.<p>My own position is that in a sane world, there would be no patent and the groups would share the Nobel. The patent ownership dispute is the only reason there has to be a fight at all, and while patents on techniques in biology aren't nearly as absurd and destructive over patents on software, I think they're almost certainly net negative overall.
Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
A Nobel Prize is now at stake. Lifespan, disease and the human race is at stake. The internal scientific politicking on both sides is classic. "by going into depth about the contributions of early CRISPR pioneers, Lander is able to almost literally write Doudna and Charpentier (and, for that matter, genome-editing pioneer George Church, whose CRISPR work has also been largely ignored) out of this history. They are mentioned, of course, but everything about the way they are mentioned is designed to minimize their contributions."<p>However, it's also clear that Doudna's work was central and a hub for overall advancement.
It looks like Professor Eisen's blog is down at the moment. Here's a link to the Google cache of that page: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a>
> CRISPR, for those of you who do not know, is an anti-viral immune system found in archaea and bacteria, that until a few years ago, was all but unknown outside the small group of scientists have been studying it since its discovery a quarter century ago. This all changed in 2012, when a paper from colleagues of mine at Berkeley and their collaborators in Europe described a simple way to repurpose components of the CRISPR system of the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes to cut DNA in a easily programmable manner.
As time goes on, I'm understanding more and more that academic science, which I had naively imagined to be a pure endeavor prosecuted by good-hearted individuals on humanity's behalf, is in fact as dominated by powerful, acquisitive individuals who are more interested in advancing their own power than in human good, knowledge, etc. The pursuit of IP is taking over the university, much to its detriment.
I thought this article was interesting because it was that first think I've read that actually lays out a seemingly plausible case for why Doudna et al. deserve primary credit rather than Feng at al. The "Whig History of CRISPR" article was interesting, but it left me wanting to hear more about the biology.
I have never seen a paper on CRISPR that can distinguish between selecting pre-existing mutants and actually modifying genes. I have read probably a dozen or so at this point, and it is amazing that they always fail to address this either in citations or actual data.<p>At first I thought it was an honest mistake, but now it would not surprise me if some of the main players know that their experiments with CRISPR have been misinterpreted. They are then pushing the gene "modification" label anyway because it is sexier.<p>After all, CRISPR has received an extremely unusual amount of media coverage over the last year or so, which raises red flags. I suspect a marketing effort is being directly funded. That is not a honest use of funds meant for research, especially that which is not meeting minimum scientific standards (ruling out other explanations for the results rather than just a null hypothesis).
the fight over CRISPR (which is a discovery of nature, not a creation), especially the fight over the <i>monopoly to apply CRISPR to other fields of science</i> is another example of why the GNU General Public License (or something with as many teeth) is required to keep science open and free.