The money men have moved in on a new technique for editing the human genome that promises to revolutionise the way many human diseases will be treated in the future. But Big Money has in the process divided a scientific community into two competing camps.

Some might see it has healthy scientific rivalry spilling over into commercial competition which could ultimately speed up medical innovation. But behind closed doors there is a desperate race to establish scientific and commercial priority over what could be the scientific discovery – and intellectual property – of the decade.