• SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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    1 hour ago

    Wasn’t he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?

  • Etterra@discuss.online
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    5 hours ago

    Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That’s their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.

    • Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de
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      18 minutes ago

      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?

    • collinrs@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      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.

  • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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    6 hours ago

    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.

    • Jhex@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      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

    • nope@jlai.lu
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      1 hour ago

      And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.

      • ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 hours ago

        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.

        • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          I wrote that on my phone’s touch keyboard, and I didn’t want to use \. to escape the dot character to avoid autohotlinking.

        • SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          4 hours ago

          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.

          • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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            3 hours ago

            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.

    • comfy@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 hours ago

        Oh shit someone tell the fascist scum liberal toads that its actually blue on blue, this guy was working for a honky kong universty!!!

      • drislands@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        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.

      • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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        3 hours ago

        Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their “cHiNa BaD” circlejerk.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.

          • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            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.

            • 3x7x37@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              4 hours ago

              Supposed to mean “machine-learning”

              No, it officially stands for Mali. Why do you think it stands for machine leaning?

            • camr_on@lemmy.world
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              4 hours ago

              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.

          • NIB@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            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.

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      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.

      • warbond@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        I was very surprised to hear that China arrested him for it in the first place

  • Hikuro-93@lemmy.ca
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    13 hours ago

    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.

    • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • Hikuro-93@lemmy.ca
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        2 hours ago

        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.

      • guldukat@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.

    • Dengalicious@lemmygrad.ml
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      10 hours ago

      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?

      • comfy@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        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.

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    13 hours ago

    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.

  • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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    14 hours ago

    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.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      10 hours ago

      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.

      • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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        1 hour ago

        The current context is modifying babies to make them HIV resistant. How would you model something similar without performing the experiment?

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      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.

      • comfy@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        This one was making a child with an HIV-positive parent resistant to HIV, so it’s a bit better than 731 torture.

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          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.

      • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
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        10 hours ago

        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.

      • Comrade Spood@slrpnk.net
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        10 hours ago

        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.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Better build a research base on Mars where legal and ethical limitations don’t exist. And IDK, start researching teleportation or something.

    • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      Preferably just die because he opened a portal to hell or something.

  • KayLeadfoot@fedia.io
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    14 hours ago

    I know him!!! He featured heavily in that one Walter Isaacson biography, The Codebreaker. About Dr. Doudna of course.

    Did he get his PHD? Well, good on him. I see China has a better anti-recidivism program than the USA has. Last I heard, he was doing hard time in Chinese prison for mad scientist stuff.