You must log in or register to comment.
I think a really exceeding important clarification here is he edited the genomes of human embryos, not babies. Babies are already born humans, embryos are a clump of cells that will become a baby in the future. I do not condone gene editing without consent, which is what he did, and yes there is lots of questionable ethics around gene editing but he did NOT experiment on babies. This should be made clear especially in a science based community.
Implying that babies are the same thing as embryos is fundamentally incorrect, in the same way a caterpillar is not a butterfly and a larva is not a fly, the distinction is very important.
I understand what you’re saying, but his experiment allowed the embryos to come to term and be born as human babies. Scientists have worked with human embryos before and avoided similar outcry by not allowing them to develop further (scientific outcry, not religious). Calling his work an experiment on human embryos ignores the fact that he always intended for his work to impact the real lives of real humans who would be born.
Real humans who would be born and could potentially have children, passing whatever genetic edits they have (intended and off-target) into the gene pool.
By all accounts what he did worked. The potential to end HIV is huge. The amount of human suffering that could be reduced by rolling out what he did is very real.
The technology is here. It’s better to strictly manage it for the public good than to lock it away.
Mengele vibes right there.
Well, the nazis did make a lot of scientific progress…
/s, just in case
The nazis were ethical compared to what was happening at Unit 731…
We don’t need to compare the two, they both considered atrocities horrific beyond comprehension.
doesn’t get enough attention, true, but both are so far over the moral event horizon, anyone who tolerates either one living should be shot.
“Speed limits are holding me back from getting from a to B in as little time as possible” yeah, and they reduce the likelihood of injuring/killing a people in the process.
yeah, but, consider: I really want to get to point B. like, so badly. and I’m pretty sure I’m a good driver.
I think he does it ironically tbh, his posts are all over the place, from making fun of Europe for regulating everything to then saying that gene editing should be regulated by international laws to then saying ethics are holding back humanity, then just saying he loves austin texas, then stating that he will not develop bio weapons lmao.
Stanford cup and CPC flag, he does have a sense of humour tbh.
Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That’s their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.
But there is probably a lot of wiggle room between what we have currently and stitching babies together at the skull or whatever people think of.
We can’t have the perfect ethics. And I’m pretty certain company’s use ethical limits to limit competition like the do everything else.
not necessarily throttle, but divert into more ethical directions.
the nazi twin ‘experiments’ for example, were monstrous but produced like no useful data.
atrocities do not necessarily mean better science. sometimes you’re just being an edgelord.
I honestly think that is the most important point to make. It is a fundamental truth and force the person to talk specifics. Why is it bad there?
I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling
No he used crispr to give babies HIV resistance.
People on the side of classical ethics say the outcome was unknown so manipulating the embryo was wrong (ie maybe it makes them more likely to have a birth defect or something else wrong with them). Others might say “an embryo isn’t a person” or “the risk was low and the gain was high” but unfortunately he also didn’t tell anyone so.
There’s also the fake “ethics” where people claim humans have more inherent value than chimps or mice, which of course we do not. Unfortunately this false platform is where a lot of the arguments are based: humans special, so we can’t manipulate their genome before birth. Once they are born of course these kids would get HIV and die, or be sent to work in a suicide (apple) factory, or help murder Uyghurs…but god forbid you experiment on people that’s bad.
I’m on the side of he shouldn’t have done things the way he did, but there are hiv-resistant babies and we know how to make them now and it’s easy.
He did things in a completely non reproducible way, which is not science or research. If any of the victims have better outcomes that is pure chance.
There’s no guarantee that they are HIV resistant, and there’s a good chance that West Nile or tick borne diseases will be more harmful than them.
Playing mad scientist with human lives is unjustifiable. If he wanted to make “HIV resistant babies” he should have done preliminary testing to show that what he was doing was safe, communicated openly about what he was doing, ran his studies by an IRB, told the parents about the potential risks and benefits about what he was doing and then only moved forward with their CONSENT.
What he instead did was mess with someone’s babies on a wild hare. That’s not how science works.
Edit: also - it didn’t even work. The girls had copies of both genes, and not the HIV resistant trait.
He gave the children of HIV positive fathers, conceived via in vitro fertilization, resistance to HIV. I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone suspects. I’m not sure children conceived the normal way would have survived.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because he’s trying to achieve something admirable, that doesn’t automatically mean his actions are ethical.
Hi, I am graduating in biotechnology and my professors discussed this in class. The main points they brought up were:
1: the technique used for gene editing in those test subjects was and still is not 100% specific. With the correct primers you can still have incorrect breaks in the DNA and incorrect adhesion of your gene of interest, pair of bases can be lost and/or introduced indirectly, causing mutations that range from luckily encoding the same aminoacid to a sequence break, altering all of the following aminoacids and resulting in either a truncated protein that luckily does nothing to a protein that results in who knows what damage to the cell. This is ok in situations where you’re changing just a few calls inside or outside of the body, but when you’re changing the genome of an entire person, that is extremely dangerous for no real gain because
2: the gene he edited was still being studied and was not guaranteed to give them immunity and it turned out they didn’t gain immunity to HIV.
3: there are better ways to guarantee a baby is not born with HIV that are better known, do not involve possibly giving ultra cancer to babies and have been throughout tested before, they did not advance our scientific knowledge and put people’s lives in danger for no guaranteed benefit besides his own ego.
There’s a reason why the entire scientific community was against his actions, especially those who work with genetic editing.
Also - there are known negative interactions of that mutation with other diseases.
From wiki:
What he did was flat out unethical and completely unjustifiable. If he had discussed the risks and benefits with the parents, ran it past an IRB, then maybe we could be having a conversation about the ethics of “playing god.”
Edit: also, he fucked up and the girls have mosaicism/no enhanced HIV resistance. Wonder how good a job he did with his CRISPR…
Wasn’t he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?
Antiretroviral therapy for pregnant women already is a safe and effective way to avoid HIV transmission to the baby. It’s part of standard treatment guidelines https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1701216324003748
So the guy has genetically engineered babies as a potentially risky and certainlycontroversial solution for a problem that already has a safe and non-controversia solution.
Is nobody concerned that illegal experiments on babies only gets you 3 years?
Maybe they were Uyghurs so it was classified as “property damage” in Chinese law.
The devil is in the details…
You are likely thinking (as I am) that he implanted robotic arms on babies but he may have just rubbed sage oil on them for all we know
He used CRISPR to make babies immune to HIV.
No, he inserted a gene that is associated with resistance to HIV, but is also associated with increased risk of some cancers. He did this without informed consent, he did this without running it by an ethics board, he did this without knowing whether it would work or not.
Let’s stop pretending that he’s a good guy that just magically made HIV immune babies.
Edit: it also didn’t work. The babies have genes both with and without the mutation.
Diabolical
Thanks for the info
definitely on the evil side considering he probably planed to infect them to test his theories
Nope, he had no plans to infect them. The babies had parents who were HIV-positive.
Wow you are jumping to a lot of stupid ass conclusions for someone who won’t google a name.
Fine, give him your baby to experiment then
Did not have baby zombie apocalypse on my Bingo card, but there ya go
Depends how successful the experiment is (and probably on what the goal is as well).
If he’d been testing the effects of grass vs grain feed on human fat marbling, I’d imagine the sentence would have been a little more severe
Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.
I’ve blocked that instance, but if they need more material to ban me I have it.
It’s literal misinformation, so it probably should be removed, yes.
Who cares about a tankie instance?
Hong kongs a dictatorship? You know, the place this doctor was working?
Well observed, its been an apartheid state since its inception as a colony to the UK.
Why did you self censor by saying “dot”?
I wrote that on my phone’s touch keyboard, and I didn’t want to use
\.to escape the dot character to avoid autohotlinking.
Everyone who opposes dictatorships is a Nazi or a liberal, who are also Nazis.
Nazis, by definition, do not oppose dictatorships. Not sure where you got that idea, but it certainly wasn’t a level-headed assessment of history.
The guy you’re responding to is a liberal doing a piss poor parody of a ML.
You can’t do a good parody if you get angry before the punchline, or don’t understand the thing you’re parodying in the first place.
I assume you guys get that a lot?
Yup. It’s actually crazy how anticommunist propaganda creates so many people who are so confidently wrong about things that are so easy to investigate.
Lol it’s so anti-communist to be anti-tankie. /s
I read it in Das Kapital, by Joseph Stalin. Don’t you liberal anarkiddies read theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
Laws were changed after this incident:
In 2020, the National People’s Congress of China passed Civil Code and an amendment to Criminal Law that prohibit human gene editing and cloning with no exceptions
So, in case you actually meant that weird ignorant remark you made about Uyghurs, the answer is no and no.
It was a joke… You don’t get to jail for experimenting with slaves in China.
Oh shit someone tell the
fascist scumliberal toads that its actually blue on blue, this guy was working for a honky kong universty!!!Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their “cHiNa BaD” circlejerk.
Thanks for the information – good to know. I assume that like American law, he couldn’t be punished for something that wasn’t illegal when he did it?
Regarding the Uyghur comment the other guy made, definitely a bit tasteless but I don’t think it’s that ignorant given the genocide China perpetrated against them.
he couldn’t be punished for something that wasn’t illegal when he did it?
I don’t think CCP cares about the principle of no ex post facto punishments.
And China executed a shitload of people for political dissent…
And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?
A lot of contexts? Like the development depending on formula vs mother’s milk? Experimenting doesn’t need to mean vivisection or injecting unregulated drugs, but if you need to do the experiments illegally, I’m not sure it was something “safe”
Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?
Not babies, embyros
Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.
lemmy dot ml
Yes, .ml users do indeed tend to be more concerned with fact-checking and saying things that are actually true as compared to flat.world, thank you for pointing that out.
Asking out of curiosity what does that “ml” mean?
Supposed to mean
“machine-learning”Mali, but the developers of Lemmy (whose instance it is) are using it to mean “Marxism-Leninism”, which is a misnomer invented by Stalin. While ml has some non-tankie leftists, that instance is infamous because of them.Supposed to mean “machine-learning”
No, it officially stands for Mali. Why do you think it stands for machine leaning?
Great question! The truth is that the CCP and Russian Federation are basically spiritual successors of Marx himself. Here’s a list of bullet points explaining…
Thats why China made a Marxism anime
It’s actually the TLD for Mali, not explicitly related to machine learning, or leftism. That’s mainly what it’s used for though, outside of Mali.
Marxism leninism, it’s a political ideology, subset of communism. Basically the communists that love USSR, China, Cuba, etc. They love running propaganda about how these authoritarian governments did nothing wrong and how all criticism of them is just negative propaganda by the West.
Always funny how the right winger .wolders love to say shit about us, but are too scared to face the reality since they just defederated from us.
Thank you kind stranger. Now I get the .ml hate
wait he’s not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher
Nah, I’m pretty sure that’s the dude that used crispr on some babies years ago in an attempt to make them immune to HIV or something.
I was very surprised to hear that China arrested him for it in the first place
Dw, he’s out now and back at it! 😱
Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before, specially on war times. And each time humanity concluded that some knowledge has too high a price and we’re better off not finding out some things.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, especially with a heavy blood cost, isn’t the way to progress as a species.
And I should know, as a person greatly defined by curiosity about everything and more limited emotional capacity than other people due to mental limitations.
If you’re talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.
They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn’t, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.
It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.
Exactly. Society should never conflate knowledge driven by curiosity and knowledge as an excuse for sadism.
There’s a difference between experimenting by following rules, and then observing the results vs giving in to base forbidden desires just to see what happens or trying to bend reality to confirm one’s bias - I mean, just look at how people tried to justify until decades ago a black person’s ‘inferiority’ and their discrimination by coming up with all sorts of anatomical observations. That’s the danger.
From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.
Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.
Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.
You can critique him all you want but how in the world did you come to the conclusion that his and goals were knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
I have problems with the doctors’ way of doing so, but their act was to allow an informed consenting(? it’s complicated) couple with an HIV-positive parent to have a child resistant to HIV. It was problematic, yes, but very different to the war crime experiments, much of which was simply about morbid curiosity and torture.
Yeah, comparing this to like the experiments of Mengele or Unit 731 definitely would be bordering on Holocaust denial/downplaying by comparing something like this, problematic issues withstanding, with those horrific abuses of humanity.
Average CCP party member
Holy shit, this guy managed to have 3 of the first 10 papers listed on google scholar about his shenanigans.
Ethics mean we don’t know what the average human male erect penis size is.
No, really. The ethics of the studies say that a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis. Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error. There are ways to induce an erection with an injection, so they use that.
Is the size of an induced erection the same as a sexually aroused erection? Probably in the same ballpark, but we don’t really know.
Source: Dr Nicole Prause, neurologist specializing in sexuality, on Holly Randall’s podcast.
A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.
It is acknowledged that some of the volunteers across different studies may have taken part in a study because they were more confident with their penis size than the general male population.
Ha, poisoned data tho
Sure, they exist, but they have the flaws outlined above.
The study I linked seems to include both self stimulated erections and erections due to injection. They also limit themselves to clinical measurements. They mention self measured results but point out that they are unreliable, as you said. They do point out however that there might be a difference between self stimulation and an erection with a partner.
But all in all, there isn’t a barrier because of the ethics involved in touching a penis and masturbation.
Of course it was biased, those numbers are huge on there, it was men confident in their size skewing the data, at least that’s what I will tell myself
Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error.
To be fair, testicles aren’t designed for that task.
a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis
Is this some puritan rule? Plenty don’t care to flap their erect penis in the faces of some researchers if they asked nicely. What got ethics to do with it when there is consent?
It’s not a strict rule, sex science is a thing that can be done with ethical review same as other medical research. the commenter im not sure is giving an accurate picture of this topic.
So wait
Who is telling the truth. My ex said it was too big. The bell curves I’ve found have said “uh what lmfao no way are you that big” but every self reported study says I’m small
How the fuck am I going to ever find a toilet that is comfortable to use in my own home
How the fuck am I going to ever find a toilet that is comfortable to use in my own home
That was an odd segue
It’s a problem for men with penises that are long when flaccid. Their penises can touch the inside of the bowl when they’re seated unless they hold their penis up.
Never taken an unexpected dip I see?
Switch from a siphonic toilet bowl to a wash down bowl. You’ll get more skid marks, but less dips, splashes and clogging.
Not all erections are sexual-- can’t they just measure the non sexy ones?
deleted by creator
if only we had some sort of medication specifically designed to cause an erection
might impact the data, then we’d only know given those constraints
aren’t there literally studies about the size that only accepted measurements by medical professionals?
Yes, and they have the problems outlined above.
Do you want BioShock? Cuz this is how you get BioShock
Or Vault 4.
Eros in the Expanse.
That shit still makes me angry and it’s fiction
Protogen has entered the chat
“You’re not that guy”
…
“I am that guy 💥”
That’s actually pretty the whole premise of The Vital Abyss short story. Cortazar explains how he signed up with Protogen and how glad he was to get the nerve staple that removed all empathy from him. Ot, and all the other short stories are worth reading if you liked The Expanse
Made the Eros comparison just a few comments above!
They were dead anyways (thanks to Protogen releasing the protomolecule), the real tragedy would be to let their deaths be in vain…
owo
not that protogen unfortunately
uwu
👁️👄👁️
Not that I support it in any way of course, but he’s not wrong. There’s probably a lot of medical knowledge to be gained by seeing how the babies he experimented on develop in the future. It’s just that the ends don’t justify the means.
It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it’s stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who’s been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren’t much use.
This one was making a child with an HIV-positive parent resistant to HIV, so it’s a bit better than 731 torture.
It’s crazy that people are trying to make this comparison. They are worlds apart. Notice how the post and most people talking about it aren’t discussing what he actually did? Because the situation gets a lot murkier when you learn the details.
“Experimenting on babies” - What?! That’s unethical and immoral! Must be junk science with no benefit!
“Made babies at risk of HIV immune to it” - Well… That’s good for the babies, but maybe he should have gone through proper channels.
“People die if you kill them”
“we weren’t sure, but now we know for a fact”
I’m pretty sure that 80% if what we learned from the Nazi/Imperial Japan super unethical experiments was “what can a psychotic doctor justify in order to have an excuse to torture people to death.”
Maybe 20% was arguably useful, and most of that could have been researched ethically with other methods.
The potential value to the Americans of Japanese-provided data, encompassing human research subjects, delivery system theories, and successful field trials, was immense. However, historian Sheldon H. Harris concluded that the Japanese data failed to meet American standards, suggesting instead that the findings from the unit were of minor importance at best. Harris characterized the research results from the Japanese camp as disappointing, concurring with the assessment of Murray Sanders, who characterized the experiments as “crude” and “ineffective.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
To back up your point that the research gained by unit 731 was useless.
Eh, usually less than you would expect. We’re really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it’s been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.
We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn’t get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.
It’s how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we’re intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don’t and look at them.
The current context is modifying babies to make them HIV resistant. How would you model something similar without performing the experiment?
He inserted a naturally occuring genetic variation.
Off the top of my head and not an expert: screen a very large number of people for having that variation, and monitor those that do for HIV infection. That phase will take a while.
Identify a collection of people interested in in vitro fertilization, ideally with some coming from your previous sample group. Since the process produces more embryos than can be used, perform your procedure on a random selection of discards. Inspection and sequencing of the modified segment should be indistinguishable from unmodified embryos bearing then variation naturally.
Now that you have confidence that the variation provides protection, and that you can make the change, identify people where the intervention offers a better chance than not having it, even though it’s experimental. This would likely be HIV positive women desiring IVF who would not be able to tolerate standard HIV treatment during the pregnancy. Engineering the embryo to be resistant therefore becomes the best available way to prevent infection.
You can then look back and compare infection rates with children born to untreated parents and parents who underwent treatment.You also do a better job ensuring the parents know about the risks and what they entail. Informed consent and all that.
If this is really hard to do because you can’t find people that fit the criteria, maybe your research isn’t actually that critical. If HIV medication is essentially universally tolerated in pregnancy and is nearly 100% effective at preventing transmission to the infant without long-term side effects, then it might just be the case that while gene editing would work, it doesn’t provide enough of an advantage to be worth exploring for that disease.
Medical research is still medicine. You’re still obligated to do what’s best for the patient, even if it’s difficult or you’re curious about what would happen.
