I am not a scientist, nor have I followed this closely, so please bear with me. But since the Nobel committee saw fit to award their prize to Doudna/Charpentier and not the MIT scientists, does the science world see that as an implicit acknowledgment or message by the Nobel committee that MIT's patent is BS, i.e. not a genuine and original innovation? Or was that already so obvious to everyone in the science world that we shouldn't read anything into the Nobel committee's omission of MIT?Bearprof said:They do. As did I when I used that term. It is just that the fast-tracking by MIT resulted in their patent being considered before UC/Cal's was.GivemTheAxe said:Bearprof said:The patent situation is complicated. Berkeley has many patents on CRISPR, and filed first on applying CRISPR to mammalian cells. The MIT group ponied up for fast tracking their patent application related to human applications (Cal should have done that!) and managed to get it approved first on a highly controversial (i.e bullsh*t) call by the patent office. But Cal has patents on the basic process, so any commercialization has to address those patents too. As Doudna once put it metaphorically, Cal has a patent on tennis balls, while MIT has a patent on tennis balls with one specific color. By the way, much credit goes to the French co-winner with Doudna, Emanuelle Charpentier.hanky1 said:GoCal80 said:
I wonder if this Nobel will somehow play into Cal's patent fight with MIT over this technology. It seems that this award, made by a committee of scholars that does a deep study of who made the various contributions before making an award, will settle how it will be seen historically.
I mentioned this last year in the CRISPR thread, but Cal wins the Nobe Prize but MIT wins the patent fight. Would you rather have a Nobel or a billion dollars?
The innovator for this technique was never in question. The patent is...
....unfortunately I think MIT has the stronger position here.
Historically, Cal has not been great at filing IP. Stanford and MIT have been phenomenal. Not so much Cal...I'm not sure why but I think we're starting to wake up to this reality.
I guess the Patent Office does not consider humans to be mammals.
Anyway, the thing is that a specific commercial application, in e.g. medicine, could require a company to license multiple patents, e.g. one for the basic process, and the other for specific use in humans (or other mammals, e.g. in farm animals).
Also Cal has patents for use of CRISPR in plants/agriculture and many other scenarios. Don't get me wrong, the MIT patent SUBSTANTIALLY cuts in to UC/Cal's potential financial yield from the discovery, but it is not as if there is just one patent for CRISPR and Cal lost out on it and will not get significant royalties from it. And UC/Cal has already, and will continue to, receive royalties from the patents they have on CRISPR.
The MIT patent was bullish*t. Most of us, even those without a horse in the race, thought that their patent was about as obvious an extension that there could be. Patents are not supposed to be awarded for obvious things. But in court, the MIT lawyers used an admirable trait of Doudna from a scientists perspective against her: at an earlier conference, when Doudna was asked whether it would work in human cells, she said she was not certain, as it had not yet been done. But she was just showing scientific restraint. The lawyers, and ultimately the court, used that comment to assert that it must not be obvious if she was not certain it would work. It was most certainly obvious, even if it was not yet carried out. The MIT lab and many others around the same time used exactly Doudna's approach to edit human cells in culture. Then they tried to take all the credit. It was ridiculous.
Secondly, and this is really a commentary on patent law, not science, but the patent office seems to have a really illogical system for rewarding innovation. It boggles my mind that you can pay to put your application first in line and be declared the original inventor of something, even though your innovation is highly derivative of an invention that is already in the "slow" application stack. You would think that the application filing date should mean something. If the idea behind awarding patents is to reward and encourage innovation, it seems crazy to me that MIT can just pay to be fast-tracked and thus claim to be "first." Now you're just awarding the guy with the smartest lawyers, which turns the idea of a patent system on its head.
And thirdly, how much is the fast-track fee and why isn't that standard operating procedure by UC and every other research institution? It sounds like you gotta play the game, as dumb as it is.
