FLICKR, ALAN KOTOKThe line started to form outside the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) before 8:30 this morning. By 9:30, there were far more people gathered than would be allowed in.
The crowd had gathered in Alexandria, Virginia to watch oral arguments in ongoing patent dispute of CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology. CRISPR stands to change the way scientists edit DNA, and thus could be worth billions of dollars. Two key parties stake claims to that market: the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley.
In May 2012, Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley and colleagues (including Emmanuelle Charpentier, formerly of the University of Vienna) filed a provisional patent application, describing her team’s ability to use the gene-editing pathway in vitro. “[Doudna’s team] does mention eukaryotic cells but is light on the details on how to scale that technology,” Jake Sherkow of New York Law School said at a briefing following the oral arguments.
...
