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.
Lander 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:
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.
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.