Comment on Least extreme biophysics phd

• 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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