Eric Lander talks CRISPR and the infamous Nobel ‘rule of three’

“Funny tensions in science.” That’s a phrase from the lips of Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

He was in Washington earlier this week to appear at the Aspen Institute in conversation with journalist/biographer Walter Isaacson, and inevitably the talk turned to CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technique, and to Lander’s controversial essay earlier this year in the journal Cell, “The Heroes of CRISPR.” The scientific community's reaction highlighted the aforementioned funny tensions; as my colleague Carolyn Johnson reported, Lander's review of the history of CRISPR set off an epic social-media kerfuffle.

In the essay, Lander distributed credit widely for the CRISPR discovery – which rankled some parties who thought they deserved more attention, or felt that Lander had overemphasized the contribution of one of his Broad Institute colleagues. He described CRISPR as the result of many converging innovations, rather than as something that erupted in a classic Eureka! moment. (In this sense, CRISPR is like the computer; as my friend Walter's book "The Innovators" points out, no single person...