The team that earned the Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of their own seminal patents. The decision could affect who gets to collect the lucrative licensing fees on using the technology. ­­The request to withdraw the pair of European patents, by lawyers for Nobelists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, comes after a damaging August opinion from a European technical appeals board, which ruled that the duo’s earliest patent filing didn’t explain CRISPR well enough for other scientists to use it and doesn’t count as a proper invention. The Nobel laureates’ lawyers say the decision is so wrong and unfair that they have no choice but to preemptively cancel their patents, a scorched-earth tactic whose aim is to prevent the unfavourable legal finding from being recorded as the reason. “They are trying to avoid the decision by running away from it,” says Christoph Then, founder of Testbiotech, a German nonprofit that is among those opposing the patents and provided a copy of the technical opinion and response letter to MIT Technology Review. “We think these are some of the earliest patents and the basis of their licenses.” MIT Technology Review

 

 

The East African Community partner states have failed to strike consensus on the growing and use of GM crops, with only Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda vouching for the use of GM technology to boost food security and industrial development. In the last meeting of the EAC Committee on Agriculture, Tourism and Natural Resources, Tanzania, South Sudan and Burundi declared their opposition of GMOs in the region. The latter entrants, Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, have tended towards opposition. The East African

 

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