It doesn’t look as if Harvard and MIT will have to share its patents on revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology with the University of California any time soon.

The U.S. Court of Appeals sounded skeptical of the appeal brought Monday by UC and Munger, Tolles & Olson partner Donald Verrilli Jr. The former solicitor general argued that after UC made the breakthrough discovery in 2012, Harvard’s and MIT’s Broad Institute simply applied it to human cells using obvious, conventional techniques.