The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Most of the major CRISPR players wanted to companies to commercialize the technology. Andy May, one of Doudna’s business associates at Caribou, suggested Doudna align with Church and possibly Charpentier and Zhang.

Though Doudna was keen to work with Charpentier, Charpentier mistrusted the Boston group of male scientists. Eventually, she and her former boyfriend Roger Novak broke off to form the company CRISPR Therapeutics. In the United States, it seemed that Zhang, Church, and Doudna would come together, despite the rivalries and bitterness. Zhang suggested to Doudna that Berkeley’s intellectual property and potential plans should be pooled with Broad’s, to make it easier for users to license the CRISPR-Cas9 system. However, Doudna felt cagey around Zhang and gave the exclusive license of her IP to Caribou. This decision would “pave the way for an epic patent battle” (207) that would hamper the widespread use of CRISPR technology.

Despite hesitance to pool her IP, by July 2013, Doudna had formed a core group with Zhang and Church, adding Harvard scientists Keith Joung and David Liu to the mix. Their company was called Editas Medicine. In April 2014, only months into Editas, Doudna learned from a reporter that Zhang and Broad had just been granted a patent for using CRISPR-Cas 9 as a gene-editing tool.