Comment on Least extreme biophysics phd

Etterra@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling

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  • easily3667@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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. 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.

    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.

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    • andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • easily3667@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Noone has consent before being born. Why is forcing a baby into this world any better or worse than changing their genes? Why is it worse to do it to a human than a monkey?

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    • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      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.

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      • easily3667@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Where is there a document that describes that part?

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• melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  not necessarily throttle, but divert into more ethical directions.

  the nazi twin ‘experiments’ for example, were monstrous but produced like no useful data.

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• collinrs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • argarath@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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    • andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Also - there are known negative interactions of that mutation with other diseases.

      From wiki:

      CCR5 Δ32 can be beneficial to the host in some infections (e.g., HIV-1, possibly smallpox), but detrimental in others (e.g., tick-borne encephalitis, West Nile virus). Whether CCR5 function is helpful or harmful in the context of a given infection depends on a complex interplay between the immune system and the pathogen.

      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.”

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    • DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Thanks for the thoughtful response.

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  • Retropunk64@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    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.

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  • liv@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    He didn’t give them that though. He just claimed he did.

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• Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?

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• Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  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.

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