When we look at the emerging and likely future battles being fought to establish dominance in the emerging field of CRISPR technologies, it may be too easy to conclude that one has no frame of reference to help understand what the conclusion will likely be. However, as Harry S Truman said; “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know”. There have, of course, been many emerging technologies that have been subject to an IP land-grab. One such instance that we will look at in this article relates to CpG oligonucleotides. Craig Thomson, Patent Attorney and Cath Coombes, Senior Patent Attorney at HGF submit an article on Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.