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Patent Office Rules CRISPR Patents, Potentially Worth Billions, Belong To Broad Institute (theverge.com)
According to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "The ruling comes a little over two months after a high-profile court hearing, during which MIT and University of California, Berkeley heatedly argued about who should own CRISPR," The Verge reports. From their report: STAT News reported that the decision was one sentence long. The three judges decided that the Broad patents are different enough from the ones the University of California applied for that the Broad patents stand. The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn't so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn't how the science world views her work, STAT points out: "Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500,000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450,000 Japan Prize in 2017," the outlet notes.
So the deep pockets win again.
Also... WTF? We stand on the shoulders of giants every day while we share and consume information, yet only one entity gets to own the technique derived from all these other people's efforts. And it's no surprise to me that it is an entity which absolutely doesn't need it.
Seriously, screw these schools who make you pay them to own your ideas... what better business is there?
It's the same thing with college sports... billions of $$ and all straight into the war chests of these institutions and the player gets to pay for the privilege...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
"Re:Is there a product these patents protect?"
Yes.
In (overly broad) summary, Jennifer Doudna and collaborators showed that CRISPR could cut DNA at targeted sites. Zhang and collaborators used that targeting capability to edit DNA. Editing DNA is the product you asked about (in patent terminology, a method of doing something is patentable). That product use uses the cutting that Dudna demonstrated.
A quick (and still overly broad) analysis is that Dudna et al discovered the science, and Zhang et al reduced it to practice. However, reducing it to practice only gets you a patent if it's not obvious.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Both institutions may have received federal monies to support the research leading to CRISPR.
If they did, then the 'ownership' should be public - as in: they receive nothing more than intellectual kudos,
No Patents, no copyrights, no kickbacks.
Enough of the institutional power plays.
What about the scientists that did it? What do they get, besides a paycheck.....
Just so much is not right in this...
Doesn't sound like a product or invention to me, sounds like a discovery of natural phenomenon and shouldn't be covered by patent but rather immediately rendered into the global public domain for free use by all.
Why should CRISPR be eligible for patent protection at all?
If by "discovered the science", you meant "developed the protocol for doing genome engineering (in prokaryotes) that could then be immediately applied to eukaryotes by Zhang after he watched Doudna's presentation on the topic", then sure.
It's a process, which can lead to products. An easier to understand example is Revere Ware pots and pans. Earlier versions of them are stamped "process patent" because the pots and pans themselves were not what was patented. Instead, they patented the *process* of bonding the copper to the bottom of the pan, which is less obvious than you might think.
If you want to argue against patents of any kind, OK; but the notion of patenting a process which leads to products is pretty well established under the umbrella of patents.
The U.S. Patent system has become a travesty. Rulings like this make me sick to my stomach. "Fast track" should never have passed legal muster.
Moreover, it bothers me that the government can take someone's physical property to build a road or even a mall, but they don't apply eminent domain to life saving intellectual property.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Zhang doesn't seem to have been the most ethical,one of the co-inventors said it was based off Douda's work. At the same time testimony a pioneer in gene splicing George Church said moving from bacteria to human cell “anything but obvious”.http://www.nature.com/news/titanic-clash-over-crispr-patents-turns-ugly-1.20631
I would say generally it is rather suspect Zhang "invented" the method just merely 6 months after he seen her lecture. Zhang also filed a fast track patent, it seemed like he was trying to game the patent system.