Basic research and the origins of CRISPR gene editing
I’ve always done basic research. I’ve never done any research specifically aimed at a clinical goal. I’ve never patented anything I’ve done. None of that motivated my curiosity. I’ve been a medical school professor for over 36 years and was Principal Investigator on three NIH grants and one from the American Cancer Society, and I never once gave a thought to how my findings would cure disease.
There are two types of people in the world: game people and puzzle people. Game people are motivated by winning, by beating others. Puzzle people are motivated by discovering how the pieces of a problem fit together. I’m a puzzle person.
I don’t have any personal insight into the motivations of the people who discovered CRISPR, but I do know that it first existed as a puzzle of immune memory in bacteria. How does a bacterial cell remember that it was once infected by a virus and use that memory to defeat subsequent infections. That sort of research-for-the-sake-of-curiosity came in for ridicule by Sen. William Proxmire, who annually assigned “The Golden Fleece Award” to taxpayer-funded projects he deemed frivolous.
The reason to fund basic research is that we never know how the insights gained could prove transformative in a different context. The discovery of restriction enzymes was, like CRISPR, driven by trying to understand bacterial immunity, and these enzymes became sine qua non to recombinant DNA technology. Few basic science discoveries will find transformative practical applications like restriction enzymes, CRISPR or PCR, but as any VC will tell you, a single success pays for many failures.
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)
CRISPR–Cas9: A History of Its Discovery and Ethical Considerations of Its Use in Genome Editing
Did you see 60 minutes last night? They had a piece on quantum computing which it was claimed will revolutionize your kind of research.
@Jack,
I didn’t, but I’ve heard that quantum computing will revolutionize everything, so I’m not surprised.
They were discussing cell behavior and its complexity in reactions to stimuli and changing “habitat” and asserted that only quantum computing could follow and analyze cell function with enough speed to be usable. Or, that’s what it sounded like to my untrained ears.
I guess that not patenting any of your innovations is noble, but not having come up with any myself (but still ‘contributing’ otherwise), I would point out that you could do so, if you wanted to.
@Fred,
I know. I thought up and did reverse-transcriptase PCR to amplify RNA before anyone published it, but it seemed so obvious that I didn’t bother trying to patent it.
My dad had four patents. Only one made any money (a device to measure valve function in a closed pipe).
An interesting aspect of results produced by quantum computing always (?) are ‘probable’ results, that are usually unverifiable in the ‘real world’, or so I have read.
Given that to some extent this is true of any results statistically arrived at, it doesn’t mean quantum computing results are useless, just that they may not be all they’re cracked up to be.
There is a notion out there (a meme?) that ‘ideas’ ought to help mankind, and benefit all. And not necessarily generate profits.
The ‘Freeshare’ community in the world of US & Canadian medical libraries operates under the premise that ‘we’ don’t charge for articles we provide to ‘other’ Freeshare libraries. (This may seem to fly in the fact of copyright restrictions.) This works great, and reduces some medical expenses for patients inevitably, one hopes. Hospitals still have to pay for subscriptions to medical journals however, and institutional subscriptions are expensive. But a lot of articles (& journals) are free. Older articles, still relevant, are often free.
This is a service that a proper hospital needs, but not one they can justify paying for, necessarily.
“There is a notion out there (a meme?) that ‘ideas’ ought to help mankind, and benefit all. And not necessarily generate profits.”
Not just a notion or a meme – it is from the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 6: “The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries … ” Note that it says “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to generate huge profits for anyone. And profits are specifically secured for “limited Times.”