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Scientist who gene-edited babies is back in lab and ‘proud’ of past work despite jailing
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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I'd argue it would be ethical if the puppies were already on fire.
He cured a genetic disease. Wtf is wrong with that?!
The hell he did. You need to go back and read what his experiment was. He says he hopes to someday cure a genetic disease. In the meantime, he was just testing to make sure he could edit genes without causing long term health problems which he won't know until the kids grow up and have them!!
No, he (hoped to) increase their resistance to HIV.
He got lucky. If he'd given them a thalamide-like condition, would you still be saying the same?
When it comes to human experiments, you can't go solo and hope you get lucky. You need rigorous reviews, standards, ethics committees.
You especially can't trust the results of an individual who has already shown a clear lack of regard for basic rules and regulations in favor of his personal God complex.
Yea. He got lucky. Lucky he spent years studying to become a doctor and then further years studying gene editing and the roots of genetic diseases. All luck. No skill or hard work at all. Just a lucky break.
There are proper procedures for these sorts of experiments that were not followed.
No amount of domain knowledge offsets malpractice, which is factually what occurred here, regardless of outcome.
Just because I have significant experience in systems engineering and administration, and we have no testing environment that would work as an accurate "clone" of reality, doesn't mean that I just get to ignore proper procedure and make changes to my work environment as I wish.
Even when I have the knowledge to know the risks, potential problems, can map out the potential outcomes, etc. I still have to follow proper procedure. Sometimes that means creating test scenarios to approximate reality, sometimes that means that I simply cannot move forward until a suitable testing environment exists.
Either way, as a knowledgable professional, there are proper processes that must be followed.
These are much more dire in the realm of medicine than computers.
Personally, my metric for "success" on this is when they die of old age with no complications that could possibly be related to the genetic manipulation. Is your metric so low that the fact they have no reported complications this early in life means success?
If he had not been successful would you be as defensive of him? The children are still children, with a lifetime of potential complications left that may or may not occur.
Medical ethics is way more involved than "one guy has good credentials, so let him at it."
Human experimentation is a fraught topic, one with a literal genocidal history. You don't let "the guy who is really good at this do whatever he wants" to people, because that's what all the murderers did too.