The War Over Genome Editing | Hacker News Reader

The War Over Genome Editing

wired.com

37 pointssituationista11 comments

> So revolutionary is this new genome editing technique that rival groups, who each claim to have been first to the tech, are bitterly fighting over the CRISPR/Cas9 patent. This new gene-editing protein called Cpf1—and maybe even others yet to be discovered—means that one patent may not be so powerful after all.

Just goes to show the silliness of patents. Even the lightbulb was invented by multiple people at the same time. Yet only one got to have a 20 year monopoly over it. Why should that be the case when multiple people invent it at the same time? Just let them compete. Competition is always good.

The standard argument for patents is that patents require that the method be disclosed. Otherwise discoveries are kept as trade secrets rather than being published for anyone to use after the patent expires.

But is that even needed anymore with so many people able to come up with the same discovery simultaneously?

Patents are no longer providing for pushing forward the sciences and humanity, merely rent seeking.

This patent allows the process to be used without cost for research purposes, but requires money be paid to the patent holder when used in a product for profit.

Is this a good way for a research organization - typically a university- to have a sort of "profit sharing" arrangement with private industry, while still allowing scientific progress to march forward?

For-profit companies would not donate a fraction of their proceeds back to the researchers that came up with the enabling discovery. Isn't this just a way to levy a tax on those profiting from standing on the shoulders of giants, which can then be used to find more scientific discoveries?

When was the last time that you, a practicing professional in an industry that has patents, actually used a filed patent's data to solve a problem (which wasn't perpetuated by the existence of said patent in the first place)?

Even if you believe in patents in principle, I have a hard time seeing how this should be patentable. You're basically talking about a protein / enzyme that exists in nature already, not something new that somebody created. Personally I would stringently object to issuing patents for that sort of thing, IF i weren't already opposed to the whole idea of patents in general.

Like another commenter said... patents like this are just about supporting rent-seeking behavior, not advancing scientific progress.

Note that the protein is not patentable, but using it in a process is what's under the patent discussion.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this process is also available for free for academic use, but costs money if a company makes a product that's sold for money.

Penicillin was not patentable, but a process for making and harvesting it easily was. Whether that's a good thing or not is certainly up for debate, although some interesting facts and opinions are documented in this article about penicillin: https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Alexander-Fleming-...

From what I understand, the Broad patents are free to license for academic community and not free for industry.

https://www.broadinstitute.org/partnerships/office-strategic...

"Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard University partners have made CRISPR-Cas9 technology broadly available to the research community. Broad Institute is working with AddGene, a non-profit plasmid repository, to offer Zhang lab CRISPR plasmids and reagents ... in addition we have non-exclusively licensed many industry partners for development of research tools and reagents and will continue to do so."

The reagent/CRISPR toolkit link here (can anyone just sign up and order the reagents?): https://www.addgene.org/CRISPR/

I'm curious, for peeps in industry who have licensed the original CRISPR/Cas9 patent from the Broad, what is the fee structure that the Broad is charging(?)

Or alternatively do people choose to license patents from the companies established by the three major PI's who claim discovery for different parts of CRISPR (Zhang, Doudna et al?)

Lastly, I'm curious why two 501(c) academic institutions are even fighting for this patent. Both UC Berkeley molecular biology dept. and Broad Institute are funded significantly via federal research grants that are awarded to individual labs within the organizations. If it seems like the status quo is that CRISPR is free to license for the academic community, does it matter which place owns the patent?

> Lastly, I'm curious why two 501(c) academic institutions are even fighting for this patent.

Their choice to freely license it to the academic community only increases the likelihood that, depending on licensing fees, the technology will generate huge revenue from industry.

That revenue will go back to the university for (hopefully) additional research, rather than to stockholders of a for-profit company.

I think recipients of federal grants are expected to patent anything that comes out of their research; some of the grants may even require it. (It's definitely the case with some EU-funded ones. Which was why, for example, the creator of golden rice was forced to patent it and sell the patent to a private company even though he didn't want to - it was a condition of the EU research grant that funded development of it.)

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