Widely admired by the public as a co-discoverer of DNA, Watson’s image among biologists was greatly tarnished by the self serving accounts in his book “The Double Helix.” The discovery that DNA was the key to genetics was the work of Oswald Avery, along with coworkers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty. They identified DNA as the gnetic material in 1943. Avery. Watson was a supremely fortunate member of a team trying to resolve the structure f DNA. Hew was fortunate to be lab mate with the brilliant Crick and to have access to X ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin.
Eric Lander is a great man,. To many of us in biology, Eric ranks with Einstein and Oppenheimer .. not only for his discoveries but for his leadership as president and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Now, his role may be tarnished. The problem is, the Broad is a copatentee embroiled in an intellectual property battle being investigated by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Lander is the author of a review in Cell of the development of CRISPR, the gene-editing technique that has revolutionized our ability to edit the genome … giving humans God like powers and the ability to make a lot of money. The Cell paper does not disclose the potential conflict of interest.
The combat over CRISPR puts Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley— along with Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany against the mighty Broad, Feng Zhang and his colleagues, Doudha and Charpentier called the Cell article “factually incorrect” in a January 17 PubMed Commons comment.
Lander may be on thin ice. George Church, another great geneticist, said “Eric [Lander] asked me some very specific questions on 14-Dec and I offered to fact check (as I generally do),” “He sent me a preprint on 13-Jan (just hours before it came out in Cell). I immediately sent him a list of factual errors, none of which have been corrected.” Another major scientist, Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote, the “most damaging Lander distortion is that all his ‘Heroes of #CRISPR’ are PIs—what happened to students & postdocs?”