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Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe
There’s a surprise twist in the battle to control genome editing.
The Nobel laureates’ lawyers say the decision is so wrong and unfair that they have no choice but to preemptively cancel their patents, a scorched-earth tactic whose aim is to prevent the unfavorable legal finding from being recorded as the reason. The dispute primarily pits Charpentier and Doudna, who were honored with the Nobel Prize in 2020 for developing the method of genome editing, against Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who claimed to have invented the tool first on his own. But this August, in a separate analysis, a technical body decided that Berkeley had omitted a key detail from its earliest patent application, making it so that “the skilled person could not carry out the claimed method,” according to the finding.
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