this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
1380 points (98.6% liked)

Science Memes

13473 readers
2489 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1380
Least extreme biophysics phd (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
262 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 minutes ago

I think you're suffering from a form of justification bias. That sounds like something out of a dystopian sci fi.

Here's the MUCH more realistic scenario that makes his contract unethical:

  • Scientists try to introduce mutation into embryo

  • Mother for whatever reason decides she doesn't want to have the embryo implanted.

  • Who knows, maybe they can't afford kids. Or her and the father are about to break up. Or she has found out she's at risk of complications.

  • Or maybe they overhear that the experiment didn't go as planned and the mutation is useless or possibly harmful.

Anyway if they say no they're suddenly in debt millions of yuan.

Implanting an embryo into a person under those conditions would be coercion.