Two Nobel laureates just lost a patent fight — for the third time — and the technology they invented is still going to cure people.

Why the ruling matters more than the headlines suggest

On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board reaffirmed — again — that the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard were the first to invent the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing inside eukaryotic cells, the kind that includes every human cell in your body.

The losers? Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier — the scientists who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing CRISPR-Cas9 in the first place. I think this outcome is genuinely clarifying, even if it feels cosmically unfair on the surface.

Here is the blunt truth: patent law and scientific credit are not the same thing, and confusing them is how people end up furious at a system that is actually working.

What the board actually decided and why it is not a scandal

Doudna and Charpentier published their landmark 2012 paper showing CRISPR could cut DNA in a test tube — a stunning achievement. But their work was done in vitro, outside living cells. Broad's Feng Zhang was the first to demonstrate CRISPR editing inside actual eukaryotic cells, which he did by October 5, 2012, according to the PTAB's 51-page ruling.

The board found that "one of ordinary skill at the time could not have reduced an operative eukaryotic CRISPR-Cas9 system to practice" based solely on what the Berkeley team had published. That is a legal standard, not a moral judgment.

“There is a disconnect between what patent law considers first to get there and what I think an average scientist considers first to get there.”

— Jacob Sherkow, Patent Attorney, University of Illinois College of Law

Sherkow has followed this case for years and he nails it. The Nobel committee rewards conceptual breakthroughs. The patent office rewards whoever first made the thing actually work inside a living cell. Those are different bars, and both are legitimate.

The counterpunch argument, and why I do not fully buy it

Critics of the ruling argue that Broad essentially built on Doudna and Charpentier's published work to get to eukaryotic editing, and that awarding the patent to Broad is rewarding the second runner who crossed the finish line using the first runner's shoes. I understand that argument. It has emotional force.

But the PTAB addressed this directly. The board rejected Berkeley's claim that Broad derived the invention from them, because Berkeley could not prove its own team conceived the eukaryotic application before Broad reduced it to practice. You cannot claim someone stole your idea if you cannot prove you had the complete idea first.

This is not a technicality. This is the entire point of patent law.

The good news hiding inside a decade of legal warfare

I remember reading about the first CRISPR patent ruling back in 2017 and thinking this fight would strangle the technology before it ever reached a patient. That did not happen. In December 2023, the FDA approved Casgevy — the first CRISPR-based therapy — for sickle cell disease.

Clinical trials are now running for high cholesterol, hereditary blindness, advanced cancers, and rare genetic conditions. The legal war did not stop any of that. Companies licensed from both sides and kept moving.

Would you trust a system that let a decade of patent litigation slow down cures for sickle cell disease? Neither would I. The fact that it did not is the real story.

What still needs to change before this is truly a win

The ruling preserves 13 Broad patents and blocks 14 Berkeley applications from moving forward. Berkeley still holds over 60 other U.S. patents on CRISPR in all cell types, so the science is not locked up.

The bad edge here is real: the licensing landscape is still a mess. Companies developing CRISPR therapies may need licenses from both Broad and Berkeley, which means two sets of royalties, two sets of lawyers, and two sets of negotiations before a drug reaches a patient. That is genuinely unserious for a technology this important.

The Broad Institute has repeatedly called for a joint patent pool with Berkeley to simplify licensing. That is the right call. Berkeley should take it.

The science of CRISPR is winning. The law is catching up. The only thing left to fix is the licensing gridlock — and the institutions involved have every incentive to solve it before the next generation of therapies hits the courts instead of the clinic.

Tell me: should the Nobel Prize winners get the patent too, or is that asking one system to do the job of two?