{"id":33077,"date":"2015-10-08T04:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T08:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33077"},"modified":"2015-10-07T21:15:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T01:15:50","slug":"science-as-horse-racing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/08\/science-as-horse-racing\/","title":{"rendered":"Science as horse racing"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Wired<\/em>, Sarah Zhang<\/a> handicaps the horses in this year’s highly competitive Nobel Sweepstakes:<\/p>\n

Nobel prize speculation, gossip, and betting pools kick off every fall around the time Thomson Reuters releases its predictions for science\u2019s most prestigious prize. This year, one prediction was unusual: a genome-editing tool so hyped that it even got on the cover of WIRED<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(No, seriously, how often does molecular biology get to occupy the same space as Star Wars<\/em> or Rashida Jones?)<\/p>\n

The tool, Crispr\/Cas9, is essentially a pair of molecular scissors for editing DNA, so precise and easy to use that it has taken biology by storm. Hundreds if not thousands of labs now use Crispr\/Cas9 to do everything from making super-muscled pigs to snipping HIV genes out of infected cells to creating transgenic monkeys for neuroscience research. But the Nobel prediction stands out for two reasons: First, the highly-cited paper describing Crispr\/Cas9 came out a mere three years ago, a blip in the timescale of science. Second, the technique is currently at the heart of a bitter patent fight.<\/p>\n

Thomson Reuters bases its predictions on how often key papers get cited by other scientists. Here, the paper in question has as its authors Jennifer Doudna, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, a microbiologist now at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. Missing is Feng Zhang (no relation to this writer), a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute and MIT, who actually owns the patents for CRISPR\/Cas9 and says that he came up with the idea independently. So let\u2019s say Thomson Reuters gets it right. Could the patent for a discovery go to one scientist, and the Nobel prize for the discovery to someone else?<\/p>\n

The two groups \u2014 or their patent lawyers, really \u2014 are in fact fighting over credit for CRISPR\/Cas9. At stake are millions of dollars already poured into rival companies that have licensed patents from the two different groups.<\/p>\n

But putting aside all the lawyers and all the money for a moment, obsessing over finding the one true origin of Crispr\/Cas9 gets science all wrong. Casting the narrative as Doudna versus Zhang or Berkeley versus MIT is a misapprehension of history, creativity, and innovation. Discovery comes not from a singular stroke of genius, but an incremental body of research. \u201cI\u2019m not a great believer in the flash-of-genius theory. If you are a historian \u2014\u201d says Mario Biagioli, who is in fact a historian of science at UC Davis \u2014 \u201cyou quickly will realize exactly how many times there are independent discoveries of the same thing.\u201d The dispute over credit for CRISPR\/Cas9 is not the result of exceptional coincidence and disagreement. In fact, it illuminates how science always works.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Wired, Sarah Zhang handicaps the horses in this year’s highly competitive Nobel Sweepstakes: Nobel prize speculation, gossip, and betting pools kick off every fall around the time Thomson Reuters releases its predictions for science\u2019s most prestigious prize. This year, one prediction was unusual: a genome-editing tool so hyped that it even got on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[713,242,183,332,380],"class_list":["post-33077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-biology","tag-biotechnology","tag-dna","tag-nobelprize","tag-patents"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Bv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33078,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33077\/revisions\/33078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}