[geofft]

I'm pretty confident that all the people here have human good and knowledge as their highest priority. They just differ on how to achieve it.

If you are Eric Lander, you've already tuned the Broad Institute towards what you expect to be the most fruitful paths of research to improve humankind, and the best way to have it improve humankind is more funding. Michael Eisen might have different opinions on the best paths of research, and you probably have some things you think will pay off that he doesn't, or he thinks will pay off that you don't. It is entirely rational to look at the amount of money available to fund research from public sources and the amount available from private industry, and determine that the best way to save the world is to get that patent and license it aggressively.

And, if you're Michael Eisen, you know that your colleagues are doing excellent work and only one person can own the patent, and that patent going to the Broad represents a significant loss to your colleagues' potential funding, so it's entirely rational to decide the best way to save the world is to contest the patent aggressively.

If we, the onlookers, want to fix this, we need to fix the funding problem. I rather doubt that either Lander or Eisen were driven by desires of patent ownership or denying other people patent ownership when they originally entered the field.