Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That’s their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.
Least extreme biophysics phd
Submitted 14 hours ago by fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/d797b778-2484-4aa4-9648-c9c2f55e4463.webp
Comments
Etterra@discuss.online 5 hours ago
Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de 20 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 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.
LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe 4 hours ago
I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling
easily3667@lemmus.org 1 minute 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.
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
Wasn’t he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 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 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
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
He used CRISPR to make 3 babies immune to HIV.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.
ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.ml 2 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.
LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe 4 hours ago
Everyone who opposes dictatorships is a Nazi or a liberal, who are also Nazis.
Probius@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
Why did you self censor by saying “dot”?
comfy@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
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.
drislands@lemmy.world 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 3 hours ago
Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their “cHiNa BaD” circlejerk.
ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.ml 3 hours ago
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
And China executed a shitload of people for political dissent…
Objection@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.
nope@jlai.lu 1 hour ago
And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?
Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?
nicknonya@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
wait he’s not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 5 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 3 hours ago
I was very surprised to hear that China arrested him for it in the first place
hikuro93@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before. 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 emotions than other people due to mental restrictions.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 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.
militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.
hikuro93@lemmy.ca 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 suit one’s desired view.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.
angrystego@lemmy.world 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 9 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 2 hours ago
I have problems with their 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 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.
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error.
To be fair, testicles aren’t designed for that task.
Grimy@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.
…squarespace.com/…/Penis+Size+Study+-+Veale+et+al…
It is acknowledged that some of the volunteers across different studies may have taken part in a study because they were more confident with their penis size than the general male population.
Ha
kameecoding@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Of course it was biased, those numbers are huge on there, it was men confident in their size skewing the data, at least that’s what I will tell myself
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis
Is this some puritan rule? Plenty don’t care to flap their erect penis in the faces of some researchers if they asked nicely. What got ethics to do with it when there is consent?
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 12 hours ago
So wait
Who is telling the truth. My ex said it was too big. The bell curves I’ve found have said “uh what lmfao no way are you that big” but every self reported study says I’m small
How the fuck am I going to ever find a toilet that is comfortable to use in my own home
psmgx@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
How the fuck am I going to ever find a toilet that is comfortable to use in my own home
That was an odd segue
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
Switch from a siphonic toilet bowl to a wash down bowl. You’ll get more skid marks, but less splash and clogging.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Not all erections are sexual-- can’t they just measure the non sexy ones?
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
if only we had some sort of medication specifically designed to cause an erection
alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
aren’t there literally studies about the size that only accepted measurements by medical professionals?
notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Holy shit, this guy managed to have more 3 of the first 10 papers listed on google scholar about his shenanigans.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 13 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.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 12 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 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.
Grimpen@lemmy.ca 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 9 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.”
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
To back up your point that the research gained by unit 731 was useless.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 9 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 1 hour ago
The current context is modifying babies to make them HIV resistant. How would you model something similar without performing the experiment?
psmgx@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Do you want BioShock? Cuz this is how you get BioShock
spinne@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Protogen has entered the chat
BakerBagel@midwest.social 10 hours ago
That’s actually pretty the whole premise of The Vital Abyss short story. Cortazar explains how he signed up with Protogen and how glad he was to get the nerve staple that removed all empathy from him. Ot, and all the other short stories are worth reading if you liked The Expanse
Grimpen@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
Made the Eros comparison just a few comments above!
They were dead anyways (thanks to Protogen releasing the protomolecule), the real tragedy would be to let their deaths be in vain…
match@pawb.social 10 hours ago
owo
nicknonya@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
not that protogen unfortunately
shekau@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
He’s right
admin@polished-informally-tortoise.ngrok-free.app 13 hours ago
Testing testing. Running an example instance. Please ignore this OP :>
Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
I won’t ignore this.
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I SEE YOU
admin@polished-informally-tortoise.ngrok-free.app 12 hours ago
GODSPEED 🫡
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 12 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 5 hours ago
Preferably just die because you opened a portal to hell or something.
Tecolote@lemm.ee 13 hours ago
Just a dash of Mengele
molten@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I know that few really care to know more but the situation is much more complicated than the information given. First of all, similar experiments have been done in china with the scientist being celebrated. The scientist He Jiankui was mostly condemned because of the media and public condemnation. His goal was eliminating HIV in the children of HIV positive parents (something so heavily stigmatized in China that you are ostracized and not even allowed to have a child via sperm washing) and he was successful! His methods were unethical but honestly pretty standard for China and he definitely acted in a manipulative manner towards the parents. But this situation in reality has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with optics. He was jailed because the ccp cares far more about china looking good than one man. More experiments with even worse ethics continue and you’re punished not based on your actions but how people feel when your studies go public.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 10 hours ago
Where do you feel Chinese ethics lack compared to American ethics?
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 10 hours ago
Didn’t he only treat one of each set of twins, and used a faulty method that has been supplanted?
In addition to all the lying and manipulating the parents to get them to agree and not ask many questions.
molten@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Sounds right. I’m not an expert but I did a report on him back in college so I’ve got a a little clear info and a little foggy. He certainly isn’t a good guy but he’s almost never represented properly which is a shame. He was no mad scientist but if people celebrated his accomplishments they just wouldn’t have jailed him.
That’s kind of the way things are done in china imo. It’s kind of a trip visiting and hearing residents drinking the koolaid and pretending to drink the koolaid just to stay safe. I’ve had a few guides with different views on the government. One “extremist” just talked to me about how people are suppressed and the government could be better. Was all about how he’d be locked up and his family doesn’t approve of his views. It’s a different place.
AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Damn lol. I’d say call an ambulance for the guy but it looks like he’s already in a hospital
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 minutes ago
Average CCP party member