From The Code Breaker (Walter Isaacson, 2021) pp210-2
After only a few months, Doudna’s discomfort and stress began to resurface. She sensed that her partners, especially Zhang, were doing things behind her back, and her qualms worsened at a January 2014 medical conference hosted in San Francisco by J.P. Morgan. Zhang came out from Boston with some of the management team from Editas, and they invited Doudna to a couple of meetings with potential investors. She got bad vibes as soon as she walked in. “I could immediately tell from Feng’s behavior and body language that something had changed,” she says. “He wasn’t collegial anymore.”
As she watched from a corner, the men at the meeting clustered around Zhang and treated him as the principal. He was introduced as “the inventor” of CRISPR gene editing. Doudna was treated as a secondary player, one of the scientific advisors. “I was being cut out,” she says. “There were things involving the intellectual property and I wasn’t being kept informed. There was something afoot.”
Then she was hit with a surprising piece of news, one that made her understand why she had the queasy sense that Zhang was keeping her in the dark. On April 15, 2014, she received an email from a reporter asking for her reaction to the news that Zhang and the Broad had just been granted a patent for the use of CRISPR-Cas9 as an editing tool. Doudna and Charpentier still had a patent application pending, but Zhang and the Broad, who had put in their own application later, had paid to have their decision fast-tracked. Suddenly it became clear, to Doudna at least, that Zhang and Lander were trying to relegate her and Charpentier to minor players—both in history and in any commercial use of CRISPR-Cas9.
It dawned on Doudna that this was why Zhang and many of the others folks at Editas had seemed secretive with her. The finance people in Boston had been positioning Zhang as the inventor. “They’ve known about this for months,” she said to herself, “and now this patent has been issued and they’re trying to completely cut me out and stab me in the back.”
It wasn’t just Zhang, she felt. It was the gang of men who dominated the biotech and finance world of Boston. “All the Boston people were all so interconnected,” she says. “Eric Lander was on an advisory board for Third Rock Ventures, and there was equity going back to the Broad from Editas, and there’s licensing agreements that can make them tons of money as long as Feng is seen as the inventor.” The episode made her physically ill.
In addition, she was exhausted. She had been flying to Boston once a month for meetings at Editas. “It was brutal. I’d buy an economy class ticket, sit straight up for five hours, and then get in at seven in the morning. I’d go to the United Club, take a shower, change my clothes, go to Editas, have our meetings, and then I’d often go to Church’s lab to talk about science. Then I would jump on a six p.m. flight back to California.”
So she decided to quit.
She talked to a lawyer about how to extract herself from the agreement she had signed. It took a little time, but by June they had drafted an email to the CEO of Editas saying that she was resigning. They finalized the text over the phone when she was at a meeting in Germany. “Okay, it’s ready to go,” the lawyer told her after they wrestled with a few final changes. It was evening in Germany and afternoon in Boston when she hit the Send button. “I wondered how many minutes it would be until my phone would ring,” she says. “It was less than five minutes, and it was the Editas CEO calling.”
“No, no, you can’t go, you can’t leave,” he said. “What’s wrong? Why are you doing this?”
“You know what you did to me,” she replied. “I’m done. I’m not going to work with people I can’t trust, people who stab you in the back. You stabbed me in the back.”
The Editas CEO denied being involved in Zhang’s patent filings. “Look,” Doudna replied, “you may be right or you may be wrong, but either way I can’t be part of this company anymore. I’m done.”
“What about all your stock?” he asked.
“I don’t care,” she shot back, “You don’t understand. I’m not doing it for the money. And if you think I’m doing it for the money, you don’t understand me at all.”
When Doudna recounted the episode to me, it was the first time I had heard her so angry. Her steady tone had disappeared. “He claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was ridiculous. It was bullshit. It was all a bunch of lies, And I could be wrong, Walter, but that was my feeling about it.”
All of the founders of the company, including Zhang, sent her emails that day asking her to reconsider, They offered to make amends and do whatever was possible to heal the rift. But she refused.
“I’m done,” she emailed back.
Immediately, she felt better. “It suddenly seemed like this big weight came off my shoulders.”
When she explained the situation to Church, he suggested that, if she wanted, he would consider quitting as well. “I had had a phone call with George at his house on a Sunday,” she says. “He vaguely offered to step down, but then he decided not to, and that was his decision.”
I ask Church whether Doudna was right to mistrust the other founders. “They were conspiring behind her back, filing for patents without telling her,” he agrees. But he says that Doudna should not have been surprised. Zhang was acting in his self-interest. “He probably had lawyers telling him what to do and say,” says Church. “I try to understand why people do things.” Everyone’s actions, including those of Zhang and Lander, could have been predicted, he believes. “Everyone did what I would have expected them to do.”
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