This week Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a process to edit DNA known as CRISPR Cas-9. But the announcement, which comes amid a years-long battle over who owns the methodology to make genomic edits, is bittersweet.
CRISPR Cas-9 is based on an immune system response in bacteria that literally cuts out invaders. In the last decade scientists, including Doudna and Charpentier, have figured out a way to repurpose the same function to edit out undesirable genetic mutations. The discovery has sparked a lot of hand-wringing over how the technology will evolve and the ethics of using such a tool to create perfect humans.
Doudna and Charpentier met at a conference in 2011 when Charpentier, an expert in bacterial systems who had published on CRISPR, was working at Umea University in Sweden. Doudna was a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley with a budding interest in the system. In their first year working together, they published a paper laying out how to use CRISPR Cas-9 to make changes to DNA. Doudna went on to publish a paper in 2013 using the same technique to make gene edits in animal cells. But Feng Zhang, a scientist at the Broad Institute, MIT’s genomic research center, had published a similar paper four weeks earlier, making him the first to prove the tool could be used in human cells. This was the beginning of what has become a years-long legal battle over who owns the CRISPR Cas-9 editing system.
The current litigation is over conflicting patents that lay claim to the use of CRISPR Cas-9 to edit genes in human cells. The University of California at Berkeley and the University of Vienna were the first to file patents on the gene-editing process, but the Broad paid to fast-track its patent review. In 2014, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded several patents to the Broad. A party led by U.C. Berkeley subsequently filed an interference claim. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board is still in the process of determining which party was first to invent the editing framework.
The argument over who gets to profit from CRISPR has been extremely public, a function of how game-changing the initial discovery was. At the heart of the argument is whether or not it was clear that Doudna’s and Charpentier’s method would work in human cells. This has been the subject of both the litigation over CRISPR Cas-9 and debate among scientists.
Rewriting history
The debacle has showcased how nasty the science world can get. In 2016, the Broad’s president and founding director, Eric Lander, published an article in the scientific journal Cell that was at best opportunistic and at worst an attempt to control the historical narrative around CRISPR Cas-9. It was called “The Heroes of CRISPR.” The title alone connotes that men are responsible for the various discoveries around enzyme-based gene editing, and unsurprisingly, the article focused on the men behind CRISPR. The article casts the Broad’s Feng Zhang as the hero who discovered CRISPR Cas-9’s editing capabilities in human cells and significantly downplays the roles of Doudna and Charpentier.
After it came out, three of the scientists mentioned in the story put out statements that Lander’s story was inaccurate. For many scientists speculating on the sidelines, the story served as an egregious example of how the history around science can be shaped by powerful people who have the potential to profit—a structure that often leaves women out of the glory. Only seven women, including Doudna and Charpentier, have ever won the Nobel in chemistry since the prize was first awarded in 1901. For some, the Cell piece was especially stomach-turning because it diminished the work of the two women under the guise of giving credit to all the scientists who had done work involving CRISPR.
