Comment by pessimist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimist | Hacker News Reader

Poor Virginijus Šikšnys, left out because the journal he sent it to rejected without review his paper which was sent before Doudna and Charpentier's.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/05/31/crispr-scientists-kavli-...

"But bad luck with a journal made Šikšnys the forgotten man of CRISPR: Cell rejected his paper in April 2012 without sending it out for peer review. In contrast, when Doudna, Charpentier, and their colleagues showed that Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA, their paper sped through the review process at Science and was published online in late June 2012. Šikšnys and his co-authors, meanwhile, had scrambled to find a more receptive journal and landed at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published their paper three months after the Berkeley team’s."

Poor Francisco Mojica

Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica (Elche, October 5, 1963), usually known as Francisco JM Mojica, is a Spanish scientist, molecular biologist, and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, known for his discovering research on the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-CRISPR gene editing technique.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Mojica

I don't think it's a case of "poor" Mojica. He discovered some important properties around the palindromic nature of DNA in bacteria, as did others in Japan. While it was important, it is not the same level of contribution as Doudna and Charpentier. I don't think that there is much debate around this.

I disagree, he did not discovered a property, he discovered and described the CRISPR mechanism. He deserves a big part of the credit, without CRISPR there is no CRISPR-cas9. With this award, they are neglecting basic research and just rewarding the applications. Btw I highly recommend to read the Mojica story it is fascinating how he found it and understood how it worked.

>I disagree, he did not discovered a property, he discovered and described the CRISPR mechanism.

Exactly this! You cannot downplay his influence, at all. He also did speculate on plenty of those applications. Really weird to have him excluded.

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