Someone summed up the decision as such: UC Berkeley patented tennis balls. Harvard/MIT patented yellow tennis balls. Harvard/MIT won.<p>I realize this example is tongue in cheek and imperfect. I also dont pretend to understand the biology, but has anyone produced a good layperson's view of how Harvard/MIT won this?<p>Disclaimer: I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
It is a tragedy that all this time and effort is being spent to create a temporally bounded monopoly which, in the long run, will likely hinder the use and development of CRISPR. Why is it not possible for patents to recognize multiple, independent sources of innovation and to award intellectual ownership of the ideas to all deserving parties?
That's it. I will patent the process of picking up rocks in order to throw them at things.<p>I think it's a great achievement to discover the CRISPER/Cas9 system, but just as a rock - it was just laying there.<p>It's absurd that genes can be patented, and the ethics is mindbogglingly disturbing - I could understand procedures and methods for <i>using</i> or <i>analysing</i> genes, but the actual <i>code</i> as found in nature?
For those of you coming late to CRISPR and this debate - it's covered in a Radiolab podcast episode from February <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/</a><p>This is an update, but opens with the original CRISPR report from some years back -- featuring Jennifer Doudna from UC Berkeley.
After having spent several weeks studying the case law and patent procedures, I have come to the conclusion that Doudna/UC were naive and sloppy in their original approach to the CRISPR IP and public positioning. Morality aside, I believe Broad has the stronger U.S. claim, at least legally speaking. It's typically not the court's position to rectify the mis-steps of others. The processes are what they are, and the law is what it is, and the onus is on the claimant to properly protect themselves.
I'm confused about how either MIT, Harvard, or UC Berkeley owns the IP. Ostensibly the research was funded by the NIH or NSF, not those institutions. Is it really the case the the universities own the IP of NSF-sponsored grants?
Call me crazy, but I somehow doubt all of this fighting over profits/bragging rights/what-have-you will speed the rate at which CRISPR can be developed into a technology that actually saves lives.
Required reading if you want to really dig on this - <a href="https://acts.uspto.gov/ifiling/PublicView.jsp?identifier=106048&identifier2=null&tabSel=4&action=filecontent&replyTo=PublicView.jsp#" rel="nofollow">https://acts.uspto.gov/ifiling/PublicView.jsp?identifier=106...</a>