The Villain of CRISPR
michaeleisen.org
The Villain of CRISPR
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#2Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#3Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
> Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley
and friend and colleague of Jennifer Doudna.
What’s the path forward? Is labeling Lander a “villain” useful?
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#4It looks like Professor Eisen's blog is down at the moment. Here's a link to the Google cache of that page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#5Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
He is also a firebrand who does not care who he upsets, which works for both good and ill. (I have worked with Mike before, although in a distant capacity.)
This explains why he can sometimes appear highly quixotic.
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#6Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
> Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley and friend and colleague of Jennifer Doudna. What’s the path forward? Is labeling Lander a “villain” useful?
It's useful when you are pushing an agenda.
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#7> CRISPR, for those of you who do not know, is an anti-viral immune system found in archaea and bacteria, that until a few years ago, was all but unknown outside the small group of scientists have been studying it since its discovery a quarter century ago. This all changed in 2012, when a paper from colleagues of mine at Berkeley and their collaborators in Europe described a simple way to repurpose components of the CRISPR system of the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes to cut DNA in a easily programmable manner.
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#8Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
> Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley and friend and colleague of Jennifer Doudna. What’s the path forward? Is labeling Lander a “villain” useful?
It's 'useful' in countering an image that people who only read Lander's paper might come away with, and useful in drawing attention to the problem he (Mike) perceives.
Whether any of this is useful in a broader sense is unclear, but we are almost certainly seeing the most important story in history of biology for this generation unfolding before us.
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#9Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."
> Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley and friend and colleague of Jennifer Doudna. What’s the path forward? Is labeling Lander a “villain” useful?
He mentions that very clearly in the article, and also makes it clear what he stands (and does not stand) to gain financially from Lander's article being discredited.
It's a very provocative title, but the policy recommendation in the article—that we stop issuing Nobel prizes and patents to individuals when discoveries happened over a long process—is pretty fair. And he does credit Lander for acknowledging all the scientists that predated both of their universities' work.
Re: The Villain of CRISPR
#10As time goes on, I'm understanding more and more that academic science, which I had naively imagined to be a pure endeavor prosecuted by good-hearted individuals on humanity's behalf, is in fact as dominated by powerful, acquisitive individuals who are more interested in advancing their own power than in human good, knowledge, etc. The pursuit of IP is taking over the university, much to its detriment.