Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    Copyrighting DNA Is a Bad Idea

    by Susie Neilson Jun 15, 2016 4 minutes

    A few years ago, molecular biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were the first to file a patent for CRISPR-Cas9. It’s a DNA-editing technology adapted from the prokaryote immune system. Cas9 is a protein that can seek out and “cut” targeted gene strands with unprecedented ease and precision, allowing for customizable DNA. “It could allow us to cure genetic disease,” Doudna recently told an audience at a TED conference, in London.

    But half a year after her and Charpenteir’s patent claim, another group, with ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, filed an expedited claim and ended up winning the patent the next year. Feeling cheated, the Doudna

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus8 min read
    Life Lessons from Hell-House Venus
    Hold a grain of sand up to the night sky at arm’s length. There are thousands of galaxies in that miniscule fraction of the heavens. Galaxies like ours hold hundreds of billions of stars—a good portion of which host planets. And a number of these are
    Nautilus3 min read
    How Life Made Our Earth
    1 Life is Everywhere Only a few decades ago, the idea that life might exist more than one mile below the planet’s surface, or high above us in the clouds, was considered laughable by most scientists. Today, it’s widely accepted that life inhabits bot
    Nautilus4 min read
    A New Way to Predict Earthquakes
    Picture a fault line, like the San Andreas fault, and you might imagine a perfect slice through rock, like a cut through a cake with a sharp knife. But these geological fractures between blocks of rock in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle are rarely

    Related Books & Audiobooks