Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna and the University of California are at the centre of a patent dispute with the Broad Institute concerning rights to the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells. After several unfavourable decisions for the UC/CVC team, a federal court reopened part of the case in 2025, but the Patent Trial and Appeal Board again issued an adverse decision in March 2026 concerning the disputed priority of invention.

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Protagonist is the complainant

Doudna co-founded or advised numerous companies involved in CRISPR and biotechnology while playing a major role in public debate on the governance of gene editing. Academic research on CRISPR ethics has used her case to illustrate the risk that experts advising society also hold financial interests in developing the technologies under discussion.

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When He Jiankui announced in November 2018 the birth of genetically modified twin girls, Doudna publicly condemned the experiment and participated in managing the crisis at the international human genome editing summit. Nevertheless, the affair raised a difficult question for the leading proponents of CRISPR: voluntary calls for caution made since 2015 had not prevented clandestine clinical use.

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Jennifer Doudna strongly challenged Eric Lander's article 'The Heroes of CRISPR', considering that it contained factual inaccuracies and minimised certain contributions to the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, including those of her team and Emmanuelle Charpentier. The controversy overlapped with the patent litigation between Berkeley and the Broad Institute.

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Directly implicated

Doudna was one of the leading scientists calling in 2015 for a pause in the clinical use of CRISPR to modify the human germline, after recognising how quickly the technology could be applied to embryos. The debate divided the community between those seeking a broad prohibition and those wishing to preserve fundamental research.

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Personally implicated

Doudna helped found Editas Medicine and ended her consultancy role in 2014, while also being associated with Caribou Biosciences and later Intellia Therapeutics. This redistribution of inventors among competing companies illustrated CRISPR's commercial fragmentation and tensions surrounding patents and scientific alliances.

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