Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize but not the intellectual property dispute and are now ready to give up two patents granted in Europe. The scoop once again comes from Antonio Regalado, who gained fame a few years ago for breaking the CRISPR babies scandal.

Now the MIT Technology Review journalist has obtained documents that are shaping the outcome of the European dispute over the commercial exploitation of the most successful genome-editing technology.

Two quotes help frame this long-running legal dispute. Doudna, as cited in Walter Isaacson’s book Code Breaker: “I think in retrospect, if I had to do it again, I would have licensed it differently.”

Jacob Sherkow, as quoted in Kevin Davies’ book Editing Humanity: “[In the future] we’ll have a million CRISPR therapeutics on the market, every nuclease, RNA editors, a complete riot of options. We will look back and say, ‘What a godawful waste of money’? Absolutely. It’s a joke.”