In the latest twist in a long-running legal dispute over a popular gene-editing tool, U.S. patent authorities ruled that the Broad Institute deserves the credit for inventing a way to use Crispr in plants and animals.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s 84-page decision involves some of the biggest names and institutions in science. It pits Broad—a partnership including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University—against the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Vienna and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier.