I think a really exceeding important clarification here is he edited the genomes of human embryos, not babies. Babies are already born humans, embryos are a clump of cells that will become a baby in the future. I do not condone gene editing without consent which is what he did, but he did NOT experiment on babies.
Least extreme biophysics phd
Submitted 4 weeks ago by fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/d797b778-2484-4aa4-9648-c9c2f55e4463.webp
Comments
stopforgettingit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
I understand what you’re saying, but his experiment allowed the embryos to come to term and be born as human babies. Scientists have worked with human embryos before and avoided similar outcry by not allowing them to develop further (scientific outcry, not religious). Calling his work an experiment on human embryos ignores the fact that he always intended for his work to impact the real lives of real humans who would be born.
AltheaHunter@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Real humans who would be born and could potentially have children, passing whatever genetic edits they have (intended and off-target) into the gene pool.
stopforgettingit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
I totally agree, I do believe what he did was unethical.
I also believe the clarification on if the experimenting was done on live human babies or if it was done on human embryos is exceeding important. Implying that this was done on live human babies is basically misinformation. Just look at the rest of this thread and how people are talking about this, everyone is discussing this as if its was living, breathing, crying babies that were experimented on, not a clump of cells before they have any type of living functionality.
If anything what you said should be included, he experimented on embryos with the intent of them being born and becoming babies. But it most definitely should not be “he carried out medical experiments on babies”, because that is patently untrue.
arrow74@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
By all accounts what he did worked. The potential to end HIV is huge. The amount of human suffering that could be reduced by rolling out what he did is very real.
The technology is here. It’s better to strictly manage it for the public good than to lock it away.
JacksonLamb@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Seems like splitting hairs, at best, for you to claim the three edited human babies who were born from this experiment aren’t part of the experiment. He fully aimed to study them and they are still being scientifically monitored.
He also had a bizarre contract he made the parents sign that if they changed their minds they had to reimburse him the financial costs of the experiment.
ulterno@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
He also had a bizarre contract he made the parents sign that if they changed their minds they had to reimburse him the financial costs of the experiment
Here’s a scenario.
- Parent gets modded baby
- Parent is approached by a corporation to take over the baby for their exp instead
- Corporation is willing to pay parent for it
- Parent later goes and says no to Dr. He
- Parent takes baby to the corporation instead, which now gets to step ahead of Dr. He
- Dr. He gets no resultant data but is stuck with the costs of doing whatever he did.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
I have talked to some Americans who claims that sperm + egg = baby and I want to place an egg in front of them and ask them what it is and if they say anything other than a chicken, I will laugh.
Also, thank you for the distinction. Kind of insane to call embryos babies. It is shit like this that makes me feel like my brain is shrinking when I talk to some people online.
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
They became babies when they were born with experimental modified genomes without their consent
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 4 weeks 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.
comfy@lemmy.ml 4 weeks 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.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their “cHiNa BaD” circlejerk.
ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.ml 4 weeks ago
drislands@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
It was a joke… You don’t get to jail for experimenting with slaves in China.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.
ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.ml 4 weeks 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 weeks ago
Everyone who opposes dictatorships is a Nazi or a liberal, who are also Nazis.
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
It’s literal misinformation, so it probably should be removed, yes.
Probius@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Why did you self censor by saying “dot”?
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I’ve blocked that instance, but if they need more material to ban me I have it.
Aux@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
Who cares about a tankie instance?
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.
Jhex@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago
He used CRISPR to make 3 babies immune to HIV.
Revan343@lemmy.ca 4 weeks 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
jsomae@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
“Illegal experiments on babies” is a user-provided note, and is not really an accurate label. For one thing, no experiments were done on babies.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The report confirmed that He had recruited eight couples to participate in his experiment, resulting in two pregnancies, one of which gave birth to the gene- edited twin girls in November 2018. The babies are now under medical supervision. The report further said He had made forged ethical review papers in order to enlist volunteers for the procedure, and had raised his Own funds deliberately evading oversight, and organized a team that included some overseas members to carry out the illegal project.
I guess it’s right that there was no experiment in babies, the babies were the experiments themselves.
It would have taken much less time to read about the topic than to make that nonsense response.
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
And China executed a shitload of people for political dissent…
nope@jlai.lu 4 weeks ago
And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?
Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
A lot of contexts? Like the development depending on formula vs mother’s milk? Experimenting doesn’t need to mean vivisection or injecting unregulated drugs, but if you need to do the experiments illegally, I’m not sure it was something “safe”
easily3667@lemmus.org 4 weeks ago
Not babies, embyros
hikuro93@lemmy.ca 4 weeks 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 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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.
angrystego@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.
Dengalicious@lemmygrad.ml 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Everyone keeps leaning on Unit 731 and the Nazis here.
What about Tuskegee and syphillis? What about the way that Huvasupai Indians blood was tested without their consent?
“Fun” fact - the chainsaw was developed to help with child birth. Lots of early US gynecology research was done on enslaved women without pain control.
nicknonya@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
wait he’s not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago
I was very surprised to hear that China arrested him for it in the first place
frezik@midwest.social 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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
frezik@midwest.social 4 weeks ago
Sure, they exist, but they have the flaws outlined above.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Not all erections are sexual-- can’t they just measure the non sexy ones?
alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
aren’t there literally studies about the size that only accepted measurements by medical professionals?
allo@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Just so you all know what his horrible crime was…
“Formally presenting the story at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) three days later, he said that the twins were born from genetically modified embryos that were made resistant to M-tropic strains of HIV.[48] His team recruited 8 couples consisting each of HIV-positive father and HIV-negative mother through Beijing-based HIV volunteer group called Baihualin China League. During in vitro fertilization, the sperms were cleansed of HIV. Using CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing, they introduced a natural mutation CCR5-Δ32 in gene called CCR5, which would confer resistance to M-tropic HIV infection.”
So imagine a couple where one has HIV but they really want to have a baby. So instead of condemn the child to potentially a short miserable HIV life, he basically made it so their children were healthy. In all my Crispr research, this is the story that most caused me to feel the science system had wronged a good person. Literally Lulu and Nana can grow up healthy now. Science community smashed him, but to the real people he helped he is basically a saint. I love now seeing him again and seeing he still has his ideals. Again, fuck all those science boards and councils that attacked him. Think of the actual real couple that just wants a kid without their liferuining disease. Help the people. Also I love how he isnt some rightwing nutjob nor greedy capitalist. See his statement about this tech should be free for all people and he will never privately help billionaires etc etc.
anyway, ideals. i recognized them when i first came across him; i recognize them now. I know enough about him that I will savagely defend this guy. He isn’t making plagues or whatever. He is helping real people.
Hans@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
This is pretty much all incorrect. CRISPR didn’t have anything to do with Lulu and Nana not being born with HIV, we have known how HIV-infected men can safely become fathers for years now. The standard practice of “sperm washing” and IVF ensured that, CRISPR was completely unnecessary.^1^ The reason the parents accepted He’s plan is because in China, HIV positive fathers are not allowed to do IVF regularly.^2^ Chinese often go abroad to get IVF done, but presumably, these parents couldn’t afforded it. Not to talk about how He completely disregarded informed consent, giving them 23 complex pages, barely mentioning that they were doing gene editing, representing the whole thing as a “HIV vaccine”^3^
^1^: pennmedicine.org/…/how-hiv-positive-men-safely-be…
theneverfox@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
On one hand, crispr isn’t safe. And life is not something people have a right to create - that tremendous imposition should be met with a responsibility
On the other hand, life is treated as cheap almost everywhere. If we’re going to force people to justify their right to exist, why not take a chance on their genetics to improve the species?
I mean, this was risky science, but not reckless. At some point we need to start fixing our genome, or we’re just going to poison ourselves to extinction
beejboytyson@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But this is what’s wrong with the world. They’d rather make a life, genetically modify it, which by the way will serve the rich, then adopt? OK I guess…
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks 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.
notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Holy shit, this guy managed to have more 3 of the first 10 papers listed on google scholar about his shenanigans.
DrownedRats@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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.
Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.win 3 weeks ago
To all the commenters saying this guy was a saint for doing what you did, would you say the same thing had the outcome been disasterous? Babies born without HIV, but with constant excruciating pain or mental deficiency.
He took an extraordinarily reckless and permantenly life-altering, for good or bad, risk with children’s lives.
psmgx@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Do you want BioShock? Cuz this is how you get BioShock
spinne@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Protogen has entered the chat
Schmuppes@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Mengele vibes right there.
admin@polished-informally-tortoise.ngrok-free.app 4 weeks ago
Testing testing. Running an example instance. Please ignore this OP :>
allo@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’d like to get in to genetic engineering. When I came across his story while researching crispr, I sympathized with him. He did the experiment in what to me is a moral way. Just going on memory it was like ‘take 4 embryos, edit two, keep parents in the loop and ask which embryo they want’. Complain all you want, but he did no wrong; it’s the public and system that then wronged him. So yeah, of nearly anyone, he is the one who most gets to say ‘ethics ruining science’. It’s ironic because there are tons and tons of unethical science activities done literally every day. But for those to be ignored and instead ethics police to hit him when he did all his stuff morally and resulted probably in two extrahealthy kids… Yeah I agree with him. I think everything should be done morally, but if he is going to be hit like that under the guise of ‘ethics’ then nah. ‘ethics’ needs to be replaced by morals and decency. Literally horrifically murdering people (war) is legal and accepted while him using science, AND CORRECTLY, to protect people from liferuining diseases got the treatment it did? nah. I hope he continues growing and doing more genetic engineering and this time doesn’t share a single thing with the public. He should never give the people that treated him like that a single piece of data. There are ways to bypass the patent thickets if he isn’t selling what he does, especially if he shares no info about it. I support him.
prepares for 200 downvotes
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Wasn’t he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?
Djinn_Indigo@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I think gene theraly is a miracle technology that should absolutely be explored more. The thing is, we’re already at a point where we can do it in adults. So doing it on embyros, which can’t consent, is simply an uncessasary moral hazard.
That said, I think the doctor here sort of has a point, which is that medical research is sometimes so concerned with doing no harm that it allows harm to happen without trying to treat it.
allo@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 4 weeks 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.
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Better build a research base on Mars where legal and ethical limitations don’t exist. And IDK, start researching teleportation or something.
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Average CCP party member
Tecolote@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Just a dash of Mengele
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Hot take.: He is right though.
Itzdan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m just here for the comments
molten@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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.
AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Damn lol. I’d say call an ambulance for the guy but it looks like he’s already in a hospital
RizzoTheSmall@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Unit 731 was horrible, but it’s still the source of a lot of modern medical knowledge
ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Watch Star Trek
Etterra@discuss.online 4 weeks ago
Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That’s their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.
LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe 4 weeks ago
I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling
easily3667@lemmus.org 4 weeks 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.
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
not necessarily throttle, but divert into more ethical directions.
the nazi twin ‘experiments’ for example, were monstrous but produced like no useful data.
collinrs@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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.world 4 weeks 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.
Retropunk64@lemm.ee 4 weeks 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.
liv@lemmy.nz 4 weeks ago
He didn’t give them that though. He just claimed he did.
Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks 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?
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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.