Beneath the technical and legal jargon in the latest documents filed in the battle over CRISPR patents is a simple argument that, in only slightly exaggerated form, comes down to this:
Any idiot could have turned the rudimentary CRISPR genome-editing technologydescribed by scientists at the University of California in 2012 into the powerful technique that has revolutionized biology. No, going from DNA floating around in a test tube, the UC experiment, to precisely editing genes in humans took the kind of skill wielded only by a scientist in the running for a Nobel Prize — say, the Broad Institute's Feng Zhang.
The gloves are off.
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