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The Villain of CRISPR
- texthompson 11y agoMichael 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 11y ago> 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?
- onewaystreet 11y agoIt's useful when you are pushing an agenda.
- Blahah 11y agoIt's 'useful' in countering an image that people who only read Lander's paper might come away with, and useful in drawing attention to the problem he (Mike) perceives. Whether any of this is useful in a broader sense is unclear, but we are almost certainly seeing the most important story in history of biology for this generation unfolding before us.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- geofft 11y agoHe 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 11y agoI don’t disagree. But I’m asking, what should happen in the next few months? Is reconciliation possible? What would it take?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- elliotpage 11y agoHe is also a firebrand who does not care who he upsets, which works for both good and ill. (I have worked with Mike before, although in a distant capacity.) This explains why he can sometimes appear highly quixotic.
- texthompson 11y agoIt 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://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- nfoz 11y ago> 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.
- astazangasta 11y agoAs 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 11y agoIP 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 11y agoWith "intellectual property" (patents in this case) it is a zero sum game.
- protomyth 11y agoThey 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.
- daughart 11y agoThis particular piece of IP is probably worth billions of dollars. I think that's a little better than applause.
- epistasis 11y agoScience has always been a human endeavor. The politics around mid-20th century physics is a similar minefield. However, it's far more pure, than, say, typical SV venture capital. Lander is widely known for being both a scientific and political heavyweight. He knows how to gain power, knows how to wield it, and uses it both to serve scientific goals and his own. Such use of power has pushed forward science to some degree by allowing considerable economic resources to be applied in a focused manner. But it gets used for other purposes too, because Lander is still a human, and still makes mistakes.
- KasianFranks 11y agoA 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 11y agoFrom what I broadly understand from CRISPR, the Nobel is almost a footnote in history, the real prize seems to be the patent.
- michaelhoffman 11y agoI 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.
- Golddisk 11y agoA lot of breakthroughs in science have a similar fate. One example was finding that DNA was a double helix with Watson, Crick, and Rosalind Franklin. Watson and Crick got all the credit but Franklin definitely played a major role in that discovery and was mostly written out.
- eggie 11y ago> Lifespan, disease and the human race is at stake. CRISPR is just one tiny replaceable part of any therapy-driving genome editing technique. The frenzy around it overstates its importance. Cas9 is significant as the first RNA-guided nuclease that we learned how to manipulate, but there are probably many more in nature. Hopefully we will be able to construct our own in short order. We have had very high quality programmable nucleases for a long time. Nucleases are not the principal expense in genome engineering. Further, if you want to be sure that the cuts you make are correct and on-target you might want to take the time to use another system than Cas9/tracRNA. However, dCas9 (disabled Cas'es) and friends are amazingly novel, in that they allow us to make huge libraries of targeted DNA binding complexes that don't cut DNA, but let us pull particular things to particular places in the genome. This is an incredible boon to certain research threads. For example, see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867413002110 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867413...
- nonbel 11y agoI 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).
- daemonk 11y agoBut there are plenty of knock-in experiments where foreign DNA was put into the cut site. Are you saying a pre-existing mutant with the foreign DNA was used in those cases too?
- nonbel 11y agoPlease link to one/some of the papers you are referring to. From what I have seen, they always detect edits in the controls or fail to report enough information to say either way, eg: "Although rare (∼1–2%), edits were detected with Cas9-only control treatment, including at the predicted CXCR4 cut site, potentially indicating trace amounts of experimental contamination of the Cas9 RNPs." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10437.full http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10437.full Note the curiously missing rows in dataset S1.
- cowsandmilk 11y agoWhat other controls do you expect to see? Dataset S1 seems complete to me. There is a similar background level of indels both at the CXCR4 site and off-target 1 and off-target 2 sites. The experiment increases indels at the CXCR4 site, but not at the off-target sites.
- jimrandomh 11y agoThis 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 11y agoWhile 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 11y agoThe 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.
- benrapscallion 11y agoThis article has a little more background: http://www.statnews.com/2016/01/25/why-eric-lander-morphed/ http://www.statnews.com/2016/01/25/why-eric-lander-morphed/
- WildUtah 11y agoMy experience with software patents makes me believe that Lander and Zhang, being part of the group that most aggressively pursued patents, are scam artists that should be drummed out of science forever. I actually have to remind myself not to feel hostility toward them. I know it's not valid reasoning but it would be almost certainly right in software. I'm pretty sure software patents are poisoning the whole patent system both from the inside and in public opinion.
- RyanShook 11y agoCan someone share a tl;dr version of this?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 11y agoEgos are colliding over attribution. Go figure! There’s a patent issue too, but it’s difficult to evaluate since the issue is between a non-profit (The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) and a public institution (University of California, Berkley) and most people acknowledge that either would be better for progress than any commercial entity.
- bio71 11y agoLander wrote an article in "Cell" about the history as he saw it of the invention of the Crispr technique. It covered the bases but was flawed, but it did include a lot of scientists that weren't included before. The article basically tries to discredit it. It wasn't a great argument and frankly the authors not a impartial (Friends with one of the scientist, and works at one of the universities) I'm surprised it made it this far on Hacker News. There is a patent dispute about who owns the patent on this technique. Lots of money is potentially at stake. This article was written from one of the parties (Broad institute and UC Berkely) being one of them. Oddly the Lander article supports the notion that this invention is evolution not revolutionary. Broad has been working to move from from CRISPR/CAS9 to CRISPR/Something else better). The UC Berkley seems to have come up with it first, but is it obvious or obvious to use in editing is the question. The UC [2]team has pulled all there patent claims and resubmitted them twice, presumably to broaden the scope and cover any use. Add some east coast/west coast rivalry and some other biases and you have a powder keg of science. Anyway lots of blame to go around. siyer posted this in a previous article which puts the patent dispute in context and if the patent is only cas9: [1]http://www.ipscell.com/2016/01/patent-expert-weighs-in-on-crispr-dispute-between-uc-broad/ http://www.ipscell.com/2016/01/patent-expert-weighs-in-on-cr... and the strange patent application by UC and : [2]https://law.stanford.edu/2015/12/29/the-crispr-patent-interference-showdown-is-on-how-did-we-get-here-and-what-comes-next/ https://law.stanford.edu/2015/12/29/the-crispr-patent-interf...
- onetwotree 11y agoCRISPR 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.
- junto 11y agoI 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-to-patent-wars/ http://www.mobileworldlive.com/blog/penicillin-the-antidote-...
- chaostheory 11y agoJonah Salk, the guy who developed the polio vaccine "When asked who owned the patent to it, Salk said, 'There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?'"
- dalke 11y agoFrom what I've heard, he wouldn't have been the one to decide. That would have been his employer, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. And its lawyers had decided that the vaccine wouldn't be patentable under the rules of that time.
- chaostheory 11y agoEven if his employer did want to patent his work, considering Salk's huge fame at the time (the guy's a modern dragon slayer), it wouldn't have taken much to convince his employer otherwise. A few interviews here and there and the public outcry would be huge.
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- nycticorax 11y agoI 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.
- bshanks 11y agoThe Villain of CRISPR is the Bayh–Dole Act.
- anonbanker 11y agothe 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.