Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

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I'm one of those who wonder if these things should be patented. That being said:

"Swoop in and patented it" is not exactly how it goes. There is a long back story to this with a lot of people discoing stuff to make this possible.[1]

CRISPR-CAS9 will probably be supplanted by something else. They're already working on it (hopefully with fewer off target effects). http://www.nature.com/news/alternative-crispr-system-could-i...

You can watch a video by Zheng (the patent holder) on how CRISPR works if you are curious[2]

I doubt she's livid, they won a lot of research prize money from their research [2] and she's probably collect money from patents from the company she started with the patent holder "Editas Medicine. Co-founded by the Broad’s Zhang (and also by Doudna, in more collegial days)"[2]

as with most patent disputes the lawyers are the real winners: "The Broad’s legal costs, paid by Editas, topped $15 million last summer. UC’s, paid by Caribou, have passed $5 million. Neither party has said what they have spent since then."[2]

[1]http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5

[2]https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/

I would definitely take that cell review with a grain of salt seeing as it was written by MIT/Broad institute.

Why? It has a lot of interesting history of the discovery of CRISPR which is really interesting..

The article, written by Eric Lander of the Broad Institute, was widely criticized[1][2][...] at its publication for being a veiled attempt to reframe history to support the Broad Institute's patent claims. Note a number of their framing decisions - choosing to group Doudna et. al.'s contributions as #4 in a long list and setting Zheng's contribution by itself in a different color. Seems innocuous when skimming over it, but the choice of what to emphasize and categorize is not objectively deterministic, and this particular framing and coloring was no doubt chosen deliberately. Many think there was purposeful deception behind that deliberate choice.

[1] http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crisp...

[2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825

interesting.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I am new to working in the Biology field. I will say that biology seems to depend on the work of many people and is kind of incremental. Its weird that some are getting rich and lots of credit, while a lot of the researchers work in obscurity. That was my take away from the Cell article.

Your first article was a good critique of the Cell article.

The second one was a little hard to take seriously first[1] (plus written by someone from the other side of the dispute), though he does come around to my original point in my original post: "And, as I have long argued, I believe that neither Berkeley nor MIT should have patents on CRISPR, since it is a disservice to science and the public for academic scientists to ever claim intellectual property in their work."

[1]"Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to stand in awe even as I picture him cackling loudly in his Kendall Square lair, giant laser weapon behind him poised to destroy Berkeley if we don’t hand over our patents."

"The work of many people" is literally the title of a paper by Edward Teller that in some opinions had the same kind of aim as we're talking about here for the Lander paper -- minimizing Ulam's contribution to the Ulam-Teller mechanism behind the H-bomb. (I can't tell if that's fair, not least because only the first page is accessible: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/121/3139/267 Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93...)

I was reminded of it when Lander's article came out, not just now.

> topped $15 million last summer. UC’s, paid by Caribou, have passed $5 million.

So a $20 million boon for lawyers and who knows how many hours the researchers lost being distracted by legal issues. One wonders how we could rework our legal system so that that kind of funds and that kind of time don't get wasted like this and instead reward both the researchers and the implementers that get it into practically usable form.

The money the lawyers made may be nothing compared to the royalties.

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