The Heroes of CRISPR
First of all, why is a Lander writing this? What qualifies him to reconstruct the history of CRISPR? He doesn&#x27;t do CRISPR research. Historical reviews are always written by the people that actually did the research because A) who else really knows what happened and B) we are interested in their perspective. So Lander&#x27;s qualification is what exactly? That he&#x27;s an important person who knows what DNA is?<p>The article itself also absolutely stinks. First an ad hoc justification why this article is important consisting of nothing more than platitudes about science, then evocative descriptions of the weather in Santa Pola, progressively more brief descriptions of other sicentists&#x27; work followed by a long section at the end which could be a slightly edited version of the closing remarks from the Broad Institute&#x27;s patent attorney in their dispute against the other CRISPR developers.<p>This in particular, stinks:<p>&quot;The history also illustrates the growing role in biology of “hypothesis-free” discovery based on big data. The discovery of the CRISPR loci, their biological function, and the tracrRNA all emerged not from wet-bench experiments but from open-ended bioinformatic exploration of large-scale, often public, genomic datasets. “Hypothesis-driven” science of course remains essential, but the 21st century will see an increasing partnership between these two approaches.&quot;<p>What &#x27;growing role&#x27;? Biology has always been largely hypothesis-free. Which hypothesis was being tested when DNA was discovered? They were trying to fit a model to the data, not testing out their ideas about how DNA should look. Penicillin was discovered by accident, where was the hypothesis there? And the importance of bioinformatic exploration? How does this: &quot;Using his word processor, Mojica painstakingly extracted each spacer and inserted it into the BLAST program to search for similarity with any other known DNA sequence&quot; support the importance of bioinformatics? Manually pasting 4500 sequences into BLAST? Surely this is an example of progress DESPITE any substantial bioinformatics.<p>I can&#x27;t see why this was written except to further the agenda of the author and his institute, and to color history to support their legal claims. I can&#x27;t see how this was published except through nepotism, eminence based science and the kind of shameful arrogance and entitlement that only academics have the luxury to cultivate. Maybe Lander thought he was setting the record straight, but that isn&#x27;t his privilege.