CRISPR pioneer Doudna envisions a world of woolly mammoths and unicorns
In new book, biochemist Jennifer Doudna envisions a world of woolly mammoths, winged lizards, and unicorns as CRISPR "allows us to bend nature to our will."
If there was one misstep that doomed the long and bitter fight by the University of California to wrest key CRISPR patents from the Broad Institute, it was star UC Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna’s habit of being scientifically cautious, realistic, and averse to overpromising.
A biochemist who co-led a breakthrough of CRISPR-Cas9, Doudna repeatedly emphasized in interviews the challenges of repurposing the molecular system, which bacteria use to fend off viruses, to edit human genomes. The U.S. patent office, in a February that let the Broad keep its CRISPR patents (for now), relied heavily on those statements — “We weren’t sure if CRISPR/Cas9 would work in 2013, it was a non-obvious advance and therefore deserving of patents.
