• DrownedRats@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    3 hours ago

    “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.

  • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 hours ago

    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.

  • SplashJackson@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    4 hours ago

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

  • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
    1182·
    8 hours ago

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

    • Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      3 hours 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.worldEnglish
      106·
      4 hours 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.

      • argarath@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        2 hours ago

        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.

      • easily3667English
        55·
        3 hours ago

        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.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
          71·
          1 hour ago

          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.

  • Railcar8095@lemm.eeEnglish
    8629·
    9 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.

    • Revan343@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      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

    • Jhex@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      5 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

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4515·
      8 hours ago

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

      • ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        121·
        6 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.worldEnglish
          10·
          7 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.zoneEnglish
          20·
          7 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.mlEnglish
            93·
            6 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.mlEnglish
      3313·
      8 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.mlEnglish
        12·
        6 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!!!

      • alcoholicorn@lemmy.mlEnglish
        198·
        6 hours ago

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

      • drislands@lemmy.worldEnglish
        910·
        5 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.

    • nope@jlai.luEnglish
      11·
      4 hours ago

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

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2326·
      9 hours ago

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

        • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mlEnglish
          31·
          51 minutes ago

          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.

          • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
            155·
            7 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.comEnglish
              14·
              7 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.worldEnglish
              9·
              7 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.worldEnglish
            128·
            7 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.worldEnglish
      21·
      9 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.worldEnglish
        74·
        6 hours ago

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

  • Hikuro-93@lemmy.caEnglish
    712·
    16 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.zoneEnglish
      20·
      8 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.caEnglish
        2·
        5 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.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 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.worldEnglish
      16·
      10 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.mlEnglish
      41·
      13 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.mlEnglish
        1·
        5 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.

        • Dengalicious@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          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.

  • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
    331·
    16 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.worksEnglish
    315·
    17 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.worksEnglish
      14·
      12 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.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

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

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          57 minutes ago

          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.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      452·
      16 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.mlEnglish
        21·
        5 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.worldEnglish
          4·
          5 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.caEnglish
        15·
        13 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.netEnglish
        14·
        13 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.worldEnglish
    11·
    15 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.mlEnglish
      51·
      7 hours ago

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