
The Villain of CRISPR - texthompson
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
======
junto
I hate the fact that breakthroughs like this are patentable.

People need to follow Alexander Flemings lead:

    
    
      The pharmacist Sir Alexander Fleming is revered not just
      because of his discovery of penicillin – the antibiotic
      that has saved millions of lives – but also due to his 
      efforts to ensure that it was freely available to as much
      of the world’s population as possible. Fleming could have
      become a hugely wealthy man if he had decided to control 
      and license the substance, but he understood that 
      penicillin’s potential to overcome diseases such as 
      syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis meant it had to be 
      released into the world to serve the greater good. On the
      eve of World War II, he transferred the patents to the US
      and UK governments, which were able to mass-produce 
      penicillin in time to treat many of the wounded in that 
      war. It has saved many millions of lives since.
    

[http://www.mobileworldlive.com/blog/penicillin-the-
antidote-...](http://www.mobileworldlive.com/blog/penicillin-the-antidote-to-
patent-wars/)

~~~
daughart
It will take millions of dollars of research to turn this basic bioengineering
technique into an approved (safe and effective) human therapy. How do you
motivate investors to fund this research without the safety net of a patent to
protect that investment from free-loaders?

~~~
jedberg
The way it was done before patents -- government funded research institutions
whose only motivation was to provide scientific breakthroughs so they could
continue to receive government funding.

~~~
daughart
There's a huge gap between the scientific breakthrough and the work needed to
create a safe and effective therapy. It's not academically interesting, and
academic scientists won't do it. It's optimization, not discovery. And what
about the cost of the clinical trial, which could be $500m?

Government funded research institutions will continue to provide BREAKTHROUGHS
to receive funding.

~~~
jedberg
> And what about the cost of the clinical trial, which could be $500m?

That's an interesting one, because that cost is entirely _caused_ by the
government. The government could for example fund clinical trials, since
they're the ones who are interested in it's results (as is by extension the
public).

As for the rest, if the science were freely available without a patent from
the scientists, companies could still spend money making it a therapy and
making a profit by doing it better and more efficiently than their
competitors, and they could still get a patent on their work.

We're talking about making the _science_ patent free, not the product.

~~~
daughart
It's an interesting distinction here. I would argue that the science is
already free. The Cas9 protein is a natural product. The guide RNA can be
synthesized easily. What is being patented here is use of Cas9/CRISPR to edit
human cells. In a general sense that is actually the product, and not merely
"the science." In other cases, where the Cas9 protein is engineered to achieve
things like lower off-target cutting rate, that is a pretty classical case of
human invention.

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jimrandomh
This is part of an ongoing dispute between Jinek et al at Berkeley and Zhang
et al at the Broad Institute. Both groups did important work on CRISPR-CAS9,
and now they're fighting over credit, a patent, and (probably) a Nobel prize.
Eric Lander, head of the Broad Institute, recently published an article "The
Heroes of CRISPR" which emphasizes his own institution's role and downplays
Berkeley's. Michael Eisen, a professor at Berkeley, wrote this article to
emphasize Berkeley's role and downplay Broad's. Lander has, apparently, been
in a fight like this before, with Craig Venter's group over credit for being
first to sequence the human genome.

My own position is that in a sane world, there would be no patent and the
groups would share the Nobel. The patent ownership dispute is the only reason
there has to be a fight at all, and while patents on techniques in biology
aren't nearly as absurd and destructive over patents on software, I think
they're almost certainly net negative overall.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
While there’s a patent issue, this is an issue of attribution (i.e. ego). I
know most would prefer either a non-profit (The Broad Institute of MIT and
Harvard) or a public institution (University of California, Berkley) than some
commercial entity.

~~~
michaelhoffman
The Broad Institute has given an exclusive license to a commercial entity
(Editas Medicine) for certain uses of CRISPR. I don't imagine UC would behave
any differently.

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texthompson
Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of
Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression.
This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in
particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
> Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley

and friend and colleague of Jennifer Doudna.

What’s the path forward? Is labeling Lander a “villain” useful?

~~~
geofft
He mentions that very clearly in the article, and also makes it clear what he
stands (and does not stand) to gain financially from Lander's article being
discredited.

It's a very provocative title, but the policy recommendation in the
article—that we stop issuing Nobel prizes and patents to individuals when
discoveries happened over a long process—is pretty fair. And he does credit
Lander for acknowledging all the scientists that predated both of their
universities' work.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I don’t disagree. But I’m asking, what should happen in the next few months?

Is reconciliation possible? What would it take?

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KasianFranks
A Nobel Prize is now at stake. Lifespan, disease and the human race is at
stake. The internal scientific politicking on both sides is classic. "by going
into depth about the contributions of early CRISPR pioneers, Lander is able to
almost literally write Doudna and Charpentier (and, for that matter, genome-
editing pioneer George Church, whose CRISPR work has also been largely
ignored) out of this history. They are mentioned, of course, but everything
about the way they are mentioned is designed to minimize their contributions."

However, it's also clear that Doudna's work was central and a hub for overall
advancement.

~~~
seren
From what I broadly understand from CRISPR, the Nobel is almost a footnote in
history, the real prize seems to be the patent.

~~~
michaelhoffman
I don't expect that the present and future judges presiding over the patent
dispute will give any credence to these pieces. Nobel committee members might.

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texthompson
It looks like Professor Eisen's blog is down at the moment. Here's a link to
the Google cache of that page:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825)

------
nfoz
> CRISPR, for those of you who do not know, is an anti-viral immune system
> found in archaea and bacteria, that until a few years ago, was all but
> unknown outside the small group of scientists have been studying it since
> its discovery a quarter century ago. This all changed in 2012, when a paper
> from colleagues of mine at Berkeley and their collaborators in Europe
> described a simple way to repurpose components of the CRISPR system of the
> bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes to cut DNA in a easily programmable manner.

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astazangasta
As time goes on, I'm understanding more and more that academic science, which
I had naively imagined to be a pure endeavor prosecuted by good-hearted
individuals on humanity's behalf, is in fact as dominated by powerful,
acquisitive individuals who are more interested in advancing their own power
than in human good, knowledge, etc. The pursuit of IP is taking over the
university, much to its detriment.

~~~
protomyth
IP is just another form of applause, and with it or without it wouldn't matter
or change the behavior. People who want the prestige will rise to the occasion
and treat the world as a zero sum game.

~~~
anonymfus
With "intellectual property" (patents in this case) it is a zero sum game.

~~~
protomyth
They would do it anyway, it just makes it more news worthy given the patents.
Although, I'm not sure its zero sum depending on how it shakes out.

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nycticorax
I thought this article was interesting because it was that first think I've
read that actually lays out a seemingly plausible case for why Doudna et al.
deserve primary credit rather than Feng at al. The "Whig History of CRISPR"
article was interesting, but it left me wanting to hear more about the
biology.

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nonbel
I have never seen a paper on CRISPR that can distinguish between selecting
pre-existing mutants and actually modifying genes. I have read probably a
dozen or so at this point, and it is amazing that they always fail to address
this either in citations or actual data.

At first I thought it was an honest mistake, but now it would not surprise me
if some of the main players know that their experiments with CRISPR have been
misinterpreted. They are then pushing the gene "modification" label anyway
because it is sexier.

After all, CRISPR has received an extremely unusual amount of media coverage
over the last year or so, which raises red flags. I suspect a marketing effort
is being directly funded. That is not a honest use of funds meant for
research, especially that which is not meeting minimum scientific standards
(ruling out other explanations for the results rather than just a null
hypothesis).

~~~
speeder
My sister was sent by Brazil's government to MIT so she can bring back CRISPR
technology to Brazil public universities to speed a research here about using
gene editing to control stem cell expression.

I've seen plenty of people and papers where dna was edited in across entirely
different organism realms, bacteria dna in animals, animal dna in plants, and
so on...

I honestly don't understand how the technique ins't about editing, the only
use I saw for it is editing.

EDIT: I asked my sister to give me links to some papers, I will post them
after she replies.

~~~
nonbel
>"EDIT: I asked my sister to give me links to some papers, I will post them
after she replies."

Thanks, I appreciate it. This has been bugging me for awhile now.

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anonbanker
the fight over CRISPR (which is a discovery of nature, not a creation),
especially the fight over the _monopoly to apply CRISPR to other fields of
science_ is another example of why the GNU General Public License (or
something with as many teeth) is required to keep science open and free.

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bshanks
The Villain of CRISPR is the Bayh–Dole Act.

------
RyanShook
Can someone share a tl;dr version of this?

~~~
onetwotree
CRISPR is a mechanism by which some species of bacteria and archea can edit a
virus out of their genome -- it's essentially a small immune system. CRISPR is
"hot" right now because of the potential to use it to edit arbitrary genomes.
Bear in mind that the technique has a _long_ way to go. It's more or less
impossible to do it right now without causing a lot of side effects elsewhere
in the genome.

As with most science, this has taken a long time and been the result of work
by many, many scientists. Some scientists have big egos and are fighting about
who the "real genius" is. Furthermore, it's widely thought that there's going
to be a lot of money in this technique, if you can get a patent on it.

TL;DR; cool and potentially very useful science happened, now big egos, big
greed, and people who would rather get rich and win a Nobel prize than share
the discovery and its benefits with the world are having a fight about it.

