In a perspective piece published in Cell this week (January 14), Eric Lander, president and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, outlined the history of achievements behind the precision gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. The problem is, the Broad is a copatentee embroiled in an intellectual property battle being investigated by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). And Lander’s Cell paper does not disclose the potential conflict of interest.
Furthermore, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley—who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, is currently locked in the patent dispute with the Broad’s Feng Zhang and colleagues—called Lander’s account “factually incorrect” in a January 17 PubMed Commons comment. Doudna wrote that Lander’s description of her lab “and our interactions with other investigators . . . was not checked by the author and was not agreed to by ...
