Crispr: Nobel prize for gene-editing technique at risk over patent dispute
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
...but patenting proteins still feels ridiculous. This is information that all of humanity has, basically, equal access to. Finding something in this pile "first" and planting a flag in the ground seems like a pretty terrible way to share knowledge. There is a somewhat forced analogy here between genetic exploration and global exploration in the colonial period, but I think most historians would agree that the "I got here first" model of "rights" ended up exacerbating existing gaps between haves and have-nots.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/war-genome-editing-just-got-lot...
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/prize_award...
in particular and with Swedish academia in general. Displeasing either the University of California or MIT is not an attractive use of the disproportionately powerful tool for making friends and influencing people which Alfred Nobel unwittingly deposited in the lap of tiny Sweden's academia.
IIAOPSW's suggestion below (shared prize for Zhang, Charpentier and Doudna) would be a typically Swedish compromise. But they could also just wait, at the modest cost of being seen as less timely.
Crispr, and the newly identified similar process using Cpf1, allow one to perform gene editing at a rate and on a scale not previously feasible.
Whether it will eventually have benefits in medicine remains to be seen. Previous technological breakthroughs in genetic modification, such as adenovirus-mediated gene therapy, RNAi, etc, have had limited impact. I believe the best effects have occurred in the fields of several narrowly defined leukemias. In these cases the entire cell population is under constant renewal, so introducing an engineered line of blood cells and removing the malignant one has been technically possible since the invention of bone marrow transplants. Doing so for other cell types or organs is much more difficult.
It is not possible to patent a natural process, and both Crispr
and Cas9 are natural, at least in bacteria. Putting both together
and showing how the molecular complex can be used in mammalian
cells was the key “inventive step” that the Broad Institute
believes swayed the US patent office – but not before the
institute instigated a “fast track” patent application to the
chagrin of Berkeley’s patent lawyers.They'll be more alternatives soon , making tis whole patent thing moot (hopefully).
One wonders if NIH money was involved in this, and if it was shouldn't everyone get to use it?
Off target effects are still a problem with this technique.
In principle, yes, but the Bayh-Dole act gives away any government stake in IP rights.
Some people see Bayh-Dole as an obviously corrupt and terrible idea. Those people typically haven't gone through the struggle of trying to justify the value proposition (or lack thereof) in an academic career. We (the US) are getting worse and worse at funding academia and this is one of the creative alternative "funding" sources used to prop up the increasingly shaky system (another important one: green cards). I suspect that if you asked most people involved in day-to-day research they'd rather take extra cash in exchange for letting the government keep some of the IP, but they aren't the ones who get to choose.
Currency might seem like a tangent, but it's not. Currency is what we use to decide who to reward. It signifies a debt owed to you by society. When someone sells you goods or services or provides their labor to you as an employee, they're rewarding you for work that you've done in the past.
It sounds like society should reward all three of these researchers. They should be able to walk into a grocery store (or a Tesla dealership) and say, "Hey, I helped invent a way to edit genes in living cells. Can you reward me for that?" We want the answer to be yes, but we also don't want Tesla and the other people who make things the researchers want to be on the hook for the rewards themselves. The obligation should flow through society like money. Tesla should be able to say, "Hey, we made an awesome car for someone who invented a way to edit genes in living cells. Can you reward us for that by giving us supplies or labor?"
Not everyone will want to reward the CRISPR folks, but there's a pretty straightforward response to that: don't reward the people who don't reward the CRISPR folks. It might sound unwieldy to have to keep track of this information when you're trying to trade with people, but that's why we make software. You'll pick an app that implements the reward policies you prefer, then you won't have to think about it on an ongoing basis.
This is merit capitalism. It requires a common historical record of who has done what for whom, which we can now build thanks to blockchains. Intellectual property is a better tool than nothing, but we're getting fewer of the inventions, discoveries and works of art than we could be getting because it's such a cumbersome tool for incentivizing progress. Let's try something else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Think about it this way: when humans invent new ways to live healthier lives, we limit the access to these inventions for at least 20 years. Isn't that crazy? Everyone could be living with the benefits of those ideas twenty years earlier, but in order to incentivize the creation of those ideas, we explicitly delay progress.
Instead, we could just pay for intellectual property as a society. This introduces a new problem of deciding the price to pay, which is what merit capitalism solves. An individual picks her own price, then decides how much others have to pay to remain part of her society of people she rewards. That is, if you don't pay her minimum contribution, then she won't do work for you or sell you products, nor will she work for people whose justification for their reward is that they've rewarded you in the past. Your rewards are cut out of her economy, which makes rewarding you less valuable for every other human. There's one less place for other humans to go to get rewarded for rewarding you.
Does this lead to the optimal price of public goods? There's no proof that it does, but I don't think such a proof is possible. Intellectual property leads to the price that monopoly power achieves, which clearly isn't an optimal price. In merit capitalism, society will iterate until their prices achieve a level of progress they collectively find desirable.
The committee is certainly secretive, but as this makes it difficult to see exactly what candidates were considered and how decisions were made, it is hard to tell whether the committee has actively tried to avoid controversy.
Regardless of the committee's intent, its decisions have been the subject of many controversies: see the long list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies