Comment on Least extreme biophysics phd

• easily3667@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ 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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      • andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        The mother has autonomy over her body at bare minimum. You don’t have to even get into arguments about parents versus children there. She (or the rare he or they) has full control over what is done to her person/physical body. That’s kinda research ethics 101.

        I don’t think it’s particular great to do at random to monkeys either. The fact that Neurolink just got to randomly torture and slaughter monkeys is very upsetting to me, and is something I will probably harp on about next time I get to incorporate an “scientific ethics” lecture in a safe space. Any kind of animal research at a university or any other respectable organization - at least if the critter has a backbone - is going to require some sort of serious justification for any unavoidable pain or suffering. My own lab experience was with invertebrates but we didn’t kill them without reason. We killed lots of them, if bug hell exists I will be there, but we didn’t torture them.

        With humans though, we have a bit more capacity to feel things like despair and anguish or even perhaps positive emotions, as rare as they might be in the modern world. A human can feel complicated emotions about having been changed. A human can feel pain from a medical condition caused by the fact that genetic mutations are complicated as fuck and we still don’t quite know what’s going on everywhere yet? I think the last 20 years of RNA research probably shows we don’t quite understand everything yet - I’m just a generalist so I’m not super familiar with how all that works but when folks have trusted me enough to do high school biology a good chunk of my lecture time is “genetics is extremely complicated, things like a start/stop codon getting messed up could change a lot, this is also why binary understandings of ‘sex’ are incompatible etc…” I’m not a biologist and I am always happy for a biologist to step in and correct me, but we don’t understand even a fraction of what there is to know about how all of this works together yet. Fuck, add in epigenetics (Lamarck as a headless horseman) and it gets even more fucky wucky.

        If you fuck up, you could make a being who experiences profound suffering for their entire life because of their actions. Yeah, nature does that, but the fact that the universe is cruel does not give humans permission to be so.

        The complicated interaction between all of it is fascinating and needs more research - on living human beings who consent to having their genetics studied. Changing random bits in vitro is not necessarily going to result in solid science in vivo.

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  • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨month⁩ ago

      Where is there a document that describes that part?

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