
Harvard and M.I.T. Scientists Win Gene-Editing Patent Fight - daegloe
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/broad-institute-harvard-mit-gene-editing-patent.html
======
kneel
UC Berkeley's Doudna should be livid.

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.

~~~
acomjean
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...](http://www.nature.com/news/alternative-crispr-system-could-
improve-genome-editing-1.18432)

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

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

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

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

~~~
tedsanders
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...](http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crispr/)

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

~~~
acomjean
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."

~~~
abecedarius
"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](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/121/3139/267)
Background:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93Ulam_design#Ulam.27s_and_Teller.27s_contributions))

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

------
Gatsky
Sigh, it's the PCR patent story all over again [1]. As always, government and
charity funded researchers are spending government and charity funds on
fighting each other for the right to make a fortune from the fruits of
government and charity funded research. 20 years later the patents expire, and
all that's happened is you've slowed down medical progress. What a great
legacy for Eric Lander and the Broad. Punks.

[1]
[http://www.economist.com/node/3839765](http://www.economist.com/node/3839765)

~~~
refurb
Does it really slow down medical progress?

One argument is that getting a patent ensures exclusivity to use the
technology. In turn, that drastically improves the likelihood of getting a
return on any investment dollars. And finally, that attracts a lot more
capital than a non-profit or gov't funded agency could typically get.

~~~
Gatsky
see the link in my comment.

Like PCR, CRISPR is a relatively simple technology. It doesn't require
billions of dollars of R&D to make it useful. Less useful gene editing tech
(Zinc fingers, TALENS) have already been used in clinical trials. So just like
PCR or that blood Myriad Genetics gene patent on BRCA1, patents hinder
progress, make research more expensive, and impair new companies from getting
started.

------
dbcooper
Apparently the following (humble and honest) statement made by Doudna to a UC
system magazine[1] hurt their case[2]:

>Says Doudna, "Our 2012 paper was a big success, but there was a problem. We
weren't sure if CRISPR/Cas9 would work in eukaryotes-plant and animal cells."
Unlike bacteria, plant and animal cells have a cell nucleus, and inside, DNA
is stored in a tightly wound form, bound in a structure called chromatin.

[1]
[https://berkeley.app.box.com/v/catalyst-9-1](https://berkeley.app.box.com/v/catalyst-9-1)
[2]
[https://twitter.com/antonioregalado/status/83200343447163289...](https://twitter.com/antonioregalado/status/832003434471632897)

------
joeevans1000
Maybe universities shouldn't be businesses, and what might be a prevailing way
to edit genes for quite some time shouldn't be controlled. Perhaps this should
be in the commonwealth. I've been to university talks where the presenters
declined to answer certain questions because they'd violate the business
interests of the school. In other words, the other researchers could not learn
about the presenter's discovery and innovation. I think universities should be
about advancing and sharing knowledge.

~~~
Thimothy
Is "sharing" equivalent to "giving for free the hard work to the private
industry"?

Most of the time the system works as intended. The researchers do their
research on public money, most of what they do becomes public knowledge
through papers, if something noteworthy is found, it's patented and licensed
and the university gets its cut. The system kind of fails sometimes at giving
the researchers (in plural, not just the tenured rockstar) its due, but many
times are the scientists the ones that open an enterprise to work it out.

In this case, it's not that system that has failed, it's that different
universities are fighting over who has the right to license it. I have no
horse in this race, but this it's probably going to become even more common,
as improvements on existing technology become smaller and it's harder to tell
who deserves the full credit.

~~~
Retric
This is 100% paid work, nobody is working for 'free'.

MIT is well known for the second form of patient troll where you look for
years of very promising research done by someone else, make minimal change
using government funds, and then get to lock things up for 20 years.

Worse there is now a huge incentive to find some other trivial change to get
around this patent thus costing the field 100's of times more than their
initial 'effort'.

------
Moshe_Silnorin
The patent system remains absurd.

I have mixed feeling about biotechnology, though. On one hand I'm a big fan of
human genetic engineering for increased IQ which is looking extremely possible
in the near future (hopefully something that will be available here in
Singapore before I have kids), on the other hand as these techniques get
cheaper and easier to use we may get to the point where any madman with an IQ
over 145 could kill hundreds of millions. Nick Bostrom asks this question in
his book: if building a nuclear bomb turned out to be trivial, like putting
sand in a microwave, would human civilization have survived? We will find out
if synthetic biology keeps advancing. Or maybe this is my nightmare and the
patent system will slow down progress enough to save humanity.

~~~
forthefuture
> slow down progress enough to save humanity

The future is the same no matter how long it takes. Advancing slowly doesn't
prevent the results of advancement. It just increases the likelihood that
something else is advancing faster than you. We should rather humanity destroy
itself than lose a fight to a more advanced civilization.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
It may give our institutions time to figure our how to cope.

------
dahart
The article doesn't mention Eric Lander's controversial article a few months
back, but this outcome certainly seems like what he might have been working
toward. Is it considered to have given any weight to their case?

*Edit: I guess time is flying, that was more than a year ago. Previous discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934149) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917391)

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
It wasn’t a letter. It was an article in Cell.

~~~
dahart
You are absolutely right. But, since I called it an article, and linked to the
article in Cell (via HN), I'm a bit lost as to what you're trying to tell me.
Sorry, is the premise of my question weird or something?

I don't know the whole backstory of Crispr or all the people involved, I just
know it sounded amazing when I first heard about it on Radiolab, and then it
got mired in this fight over credit and rights. I'm wondering if Lander's
piece was influential in this first victory, and whether this outcome was part
of his intent in writing it.

------
coldcode
You take public money to do research, any fruits from that money belong to the
public. You don't get to start companies and patent the end result and get
rich off of our money. If you purely take private money you work in some
startup you can do stuff like this. Even then I would argue that understanding
or discovering some biological entity should not be patentable.

~~~
throwaway729
_> You take public money to do research, any fruits from that money belong to
the public_

TBF we did try this in the US, and this is exactly how things worked for
decades. That rule was eventually shot down for a whole host of reasons.

 _> If you purely take private money you work in some startup you can do stuff
like this_

How about this scenario:

Person A invents something using public money.

Person B creates a start-up using Person A's invention.

Person C needs said invention, and can only get it from Person B, who charges
them for it.

In other words, if the fruits of the labor are going to be extracted by
_someone_ , shouldn't that someone be the person who made the actual discovery
(assuming they're willing to do the business side as well)?

------
nzjrs
Interesting, especially because I think most people in the field expect the
Nobel prize to contrast this decision and go to Doudna+ and not Zhang

~~~
dekhn
Money's on Doudna, Charpentier and Zhang as the 3.

------
dkarapetyan
Unfortunate. Clearly everyone involved had a part to play in the discovery but
I guess there is no such thing as a joint patent.

~~~
unavoidable
In fact, the patent system comes close. If what you contributed was inventive
and new, you get a patent on that slice of what you invented. For someone to
commercialize the whole thing, they may need to pay both parties (essentially
both parties who had a part to play in the "discovery" will be paid for their
work). In many cases like this, the parties have to cross-license each other
(pay each other or license each other for their respective patents).

That is actually what the article says.

"An appeals board of the patent office ruled that the gene-editing inventions
claimed by the two institutions were separate and do not overlap."

"Ultimately, companies wanting to apply Crispr for use in medicine,
agriculture or other fields might need licenses from both the Broad Institute
and the University of California, a lawyer for the university said. ..."

~~~
WildUtah
The usual result is that no creative applications of the new technology are
legal until both patents run out in 20 years.

Or that a foreign nation that didn't accept the patents becomes the only
center of innovation and the nation that paid for it becomes a backwater.

One or both of those happened with steam engines, sewing machines, and
aeroplanes. Humanity was not better off.

It was narrowly averted in photography, automobiles, and computer software by
governments invalidating the pioneer patents in the field for the benefit of
mankind.

~~~
spangry
I hear ya, especially on aeroplanes (it turns out the Wright brothers were
kinda jerks). It's such a shame that, due to the current nature of political
discourse, it seems that the only two plausible options are (a) artificial and
stifling patent monopolies or (b) expropriation by the state.

There seems to be a very sensible, but verboten, middle ground here:
government funding of socially beneficial research and, if a significant
public benefit can be demonstrated, compulsory state acquisition under the
condition that just compensation is given.

------
stillsut
The traditional explanation for the economic usefulness of patents is that it
incentivizes public disclosure of discoveries, and prevents trade secrets from
dominating the innovation economy. (Imagine if the cure to cancer was kept as
secret as the recipe for Coca Cola!)

The odd part of this case is that it might cause researchers to hold back from
publishing their discoveries until they're sure their own institution can
'squeeze out all the juice' and best monetize the novel finding.

On the other hand, perhaps it incentivizes more classical research
institutions to employ top teams of researchers who can prototype the
'medicine' part of a biomedicine discovery as quickly as possible. In truth,
there are a lot of amazing discoveries at the ground level of molecular
biology, which _plausibly could_ revolutionize human health, but are still
waiting decades later to be shown to be practical.

------
transfire
I believe the government should apply eminent domain to key technologies that
promise wide-scale advancement for society. Technologies like CRISPR are far
too powerful and have far too much potential to be confined to control by a
single entity.

------
source99
I would imagine that this would go on to appeal and be in the courts for years
if it decades. Especially once the parents actually produce royalties. No?

------
jghn
This has nothing to do with Harvard nor MIT. it is now a company of its own
right, but the name still persists

------
slantaclaus
Rode $EDIT from $30/share to $15/share, here we go (designer) baby

~~~
aerovistae
what??

