She worked on this technology for years, developing it from it's infancy to in vitro proof. MIT scientists swooped in and within 2 months applied it in-vivo and patented it.
I guess to be rewarded in science you have to be a master in your field and intensely concerned with IP deadlines.
It's really a shame that Berkeley loses licensing on a tech that was 95% developed at Berkeley.
"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/
[1] http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crisp...
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."
I was reminded of it when Lander's article came out, not just now.
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.
Science = standing on the shoulders of others. It is not fair if the one (momentarily) standing on top receives all the benefits.
Yes, one of the two labs discovered CRISPR. OK, now what? It's not a treatment at this point, it's just a technique. So someone has to invest a ton of money to turn the technique into a therapy for humans. And I would bet that investment will absolutely dwarf what's been spent so far.
Instead, we could grant subsidies and have multiple developments working in parallel.
Dr. Zhang and MIT proved that the Crispr technique would work in plant, animal and human cells. The value of the patents is in that research, not Doudna's in vitro proof.
Transferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did. Transferring genes from one organism to another is run of the mill molecular biology.
If this was the case then she would have won the patent fight. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board thought otherwise. Did you read their 51-page decision?
Nobody, including Doudna, would agree with this.
This tech has been around for years. Monsanto wouldn't exist without molecular biology. We'd still be extracting insulin out of farm animals if molecular biology hadn't allowed scientists to grow it in yeast.
The tech is really not the same, it's the difference between hand braided core-ram and re programmable memory. It's a huge difference.
The tool is extremely effective, as you say, and was primarily "designed" via natural selection. The researchers (1) discovered it, teased out its mechanism of action, and its programmability, and (2) did standard molecular bio techniques to show that it works across several oragnisms.
This ruling is based on the fact that the original inventors didn't throw the genes into cells, publish, and (most importantly) apply for patents before the Broad group did. Whether it would work in those other cells was a crapshoot and doesn't represent any significant creative work, and a minor work of science. The importance is the result - we know it works in those cells.
Source: I also work in this field. This ruling is absurd.
But what Zhang did was not trivial. He did not just take Doudna's system and threw it into a mammalian system. He modified the system so: 1) codon optimized (not very hard, I know). 2) Added two localization signal sequences so it goes into the nucleus. 3) And most importantly, he modified the system (nuclease to nickase) so mismatch repair (homology based repair) occurs more frequently than non-homologous end joining. These modifications are not trivial and probably took a lot of trial and error.
Just because crispr is so simple to perform now doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of effort on both Doudna and Zhang's part.
Personally, I believe both of them should have been on the patent. For me, Doudna came up with the Ford model T and Zhang iterated and extended it into a Ferrari.
This is wrong.
It's really a shame that Berkeley loses licensing on a tech that was 95% developed at Berkeley.
This is very wrong.