Woah. I knew about Sayre's law, but this is pitched battle. Granted, a Nobel and lots of prestige is on the line, but this is some vicious shit.

Michael Eisen is a known shit-stirrer, but he's often (and in this case definitely) right. This is getting vicious now though. Thankfully Zhang, Doudna, & co have the sense not to take the argument to social media.

Thundara, how big of a deal is this dispute from where you're standing, work-wise? Like is this stuff everyone you work with is talking about right now?

To academic labs, it matters little. Cas9 has and will continue to be free for non-commercial use. To industry licenses, Zhang's lab has Cpf1 nailed down, so there's that as a fallback if Cas9's patent goes to Berkeley. However I wouldn't be surprised if there just turns out to be a lot of heterogeneity in gene editing implementations, as there are already therapies using ZFNs and TALENs in the clinic, and it may turn out that different proteins work better in different parts of the genome / age of patient.

That said, a few of my friends at the Broad have been discussing this (I was chatting with a friend in Zhang's lab just two days ago about it).

They've been saying that the institute would stand to make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars if they win the Cas9 patent (Also with all of the derivative patents they've published since 2012). But they also think it might be a toss-up who gets it. It as before the recent change in patent law from first-to-invent to first-to-file. And Doudna was the first to publish in a scientific journal, but Zhang was the first to file a grant application with the idea.

So it really is a situation where lab notebooks are out and whoever has the earlier scrawled notes and wherever that grey definition of "invented" is drawn will decide which university gets a whole lot of money.