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A junior scientist formerly employed by the Broad Institute says the storied MIT-Harvard institution’s claim to have invented CRISPR gene editing isn’t accurate, and that the organization misled the patent office.

The former graduate student, Shuailiang Lin, made his accusations in an e-mail sent to Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is Broad’s chief rival for scientific and commercial credit to CRISPR.

In the e-mail, sent on February 28, 2015, Lin called the Broad’s claims “a joke” and “unfair to me and [to] science history.” He went on to say, “I will try to defend the truth.”

The explosive e-mail appears among a deluge of legal filings made public this week by the U.S. Patent Office as part of a high-stakes dispute between Broad and Berkeley to control the intellectual property in CRISPR, a powerful way of altering the DNA inside living cells that’s already worth billions.

Continue reading on MIT Technology Review...

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