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by KasianFranks 3801 days ago
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.
3 comments
eggie 3801 days 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/S0092867413...

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Golddisk 3801 days ago
A 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.
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seren 3801 days ago
From what I broadly understand from CRISPR, the Nobel is almost a footnote in history, the real prize seems to be the patent.
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michaelhoffman 3801 days ago
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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