that is also where i place the importance: on the kids and parents. Not the science community nor science councils. Probably why i dont work at a university lab
I’m just here for the comments
To all the commenters saying this guy was a saint for doing what he did, would you say the same thing had the outcome been disastrous? Babies born without HIV, but with constant excruciating pain or mental deficiency?
He took an extraordinarily reckless and permanently life-altering, for good or bad, risk with children's lives.
edit: spelling
The good old adage: "you don’t have a gambling addiction as long as you keep winning"
A lot of geneticist are DEEPLY against trying these things. This guy's lucky so far in that his actions haven't caused serious problems, we really don't know how adjusting genetics can backfire, but according to the professionals the risks are very very high.
it aint luck. he did it right
This is the moral dilemma.
The whole Grimdank universe of just randomly testing things on people to make humans genetically more superior will absolutely improve life for future humans. No question. On paper anyways.
This is very hypothetical. You could make the same argument about any experimental medical intervention in a child's life. If I had the choice of being born with HIV or an experimental procedure with some (how much?) chance of risk, I'd chose the procedure. I think the criticism of this form of treatment is highly coloured because it sounds like "playing god."
You could make the same argument about any experimental medical intervention in a child’s life
Yup, and there's even ethics review boards convened solely to analyze that argument with the particulars of a case and rule whether the treatment is okay to go ahead. This guy played god without approval from this review process and deserved the time served.
Sure lets just torture all the poor people so a handfull of rich fucks can afford stem-cell-zinfandel, never mind that 100,000 people were tortured and killed, at least we discovered a new anti-wrinkle cream. If you don't think that's what it always is in practice you're delusional. Shit like that is just as likely to cause mass disease or our extinction than it is to discover something useful, perhaps even more so
Who are you even responding to?
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, and yes there is lots of questionable ethics around gene editing but he did NOT experiment on babies. This should be made clear especially in a science based community, memes or not.
Implying that babies are the same thing as embryos is fundamentally incorrect, in the same way a caterpillar is not a butterfly and a larva is not a fly, the distinction is very important.
EDIT To add further detail - One of the reasons this is so unethical is that he experimented on human embryos that were later born and became babies. His intent was always to create a gene edited human, but the modifications were done while they were embryos, not live babies.
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.
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.
I totally agree, I do believe what he did was unethical and criminal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. He basically made it so their children were hiv free and then immunized them (edited for accuracy). 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. 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.
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: https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-blog/2017/june/how-hiv-positive-men-safely-become-fathers
2: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/04/1048829/he-jiankui-prison-free-crispr-babies/
3: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6490874/#pbio.3000223.ref008
and those arent even the most aggressive articles. Anyway, for people reading, there are many contradictory parts of He's case depending where you look.
thanks i agree i had the 'kids would have been born with hiv otherwise with no alternative' part wrong. good correction. I have edited my comment accordingly. He removed the Hiv with one procedure and immunized with the other.
heres a much less biased telling of events. No it doesnt 100% support He being a saint. it isnt that biased nontrustable trash tho "As the couples listened and flipped through the forms, occasionally asking questions, two witnesses—one American, the other Chinese—observed. Another lab member shot video, which Science has seen, of part of the 50-minute meeting. He had recruited those couples because the husbands were living with HIV infections kept under control by antiviral drugs. The IVF procedure would use a reliable process called sperm washing to remove the virus before insemination, so father-to-child transmission was not a concern. Rather, He sought couples who had endured HIV-related stigma and discrimination and wanted to spare their children that fate by dramatically reducing their risk of ever becoming infected.
He, who for much of his brief career had specialized in sequencing DNA, offered a potential solution: CRISPR, the genome-editing tool that was revolutionizing biology, could alter a gene in IVF embryos to cripple production of an immune cell surface protein, CCR5, that HIV uses to establish an infection. "This technique may be able to produce an IVF baby naturally immunized against AIDS," one consent form read."
funny how things can look so different according to what side u are on. tho im not even going for pro He articles, just neutral or interviews. As far as your hostile ones where they weaponize anything they can... (reminds me of politics) the part I find sillyest is when they complain how He only successfully did the full mutation to one girl so the other may not be immunized. Like it's bad he did it but also bad he didnt do it enough. lol. its exactly like politics.
Also i havent researched the validity of the ivf not allowed in china stuff, but I don't consider it a bad thing He giving the parents an avenue to a hivfree child when they otherwise are assumed 'too poor' to be able to do it. In fact that totally matches his statements about cures should not be paywalled; and i agree with him. Good thing for the families he was doing this experiment. Now they can have an hiv free child where they couldn't before.
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
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....
Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That's their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.
not necessarily throttle, but divert into more ethical directions.
the nazi twin 'experiments' for example, were monstrous but produced like no useful data.
atrocities do not necessarily mean better science. sometimes you're just being an edgelord.
I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling
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 (ie maybe it makes them more likely to have a birth defect or something else wrong with them). 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. Unfortunately this false platform is where a lot of the arguments are based: humans special, so we can't manipulate their genome before birth. Once they are born of course these kids would get HIV and die, or be sent to work in a suicide (apple) factory, or help murder Uyghurs...but god forbid you experiment on people that's bad.
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 and it's easy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
He didn't give them that though. He just claimed he did.
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.
Newborns need medical treatments all the time and can't consent. I agree that the inability to consent should encourage non-intervention -- for instance, we shouldn't "correct" intersex infants' genitals -- but there is a limit to this.
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.
Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.
It's literal misinformation, so it probably should be removed, yes.
I've blocked that instance, but if they need more material to ban me I have it.
Who cares about a tankie instance?
https://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.
Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their "cHiNa BaD" circlejerk.
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.
It was a joke... You don't get to jail for experimenting with slaves in China.
"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.
Another thing -- unlike "murder," there is a gradient of what constitutes an "illegal experiment." The phrase "illegal experiments on babies" sounds terrible, but if you imagine a volume dial on this crime, one could lower it until one finds the minimum violation possible which could technically be described as an "illegal experiment" -- for instance, flicking a baby with your index finger to check its reflexes. So it should not be of any surprise that there are such things as "illegal experiments" which are so mild as to warrant just 3 years in prison.
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.
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
And China executed a shitload of people for political dissent...
And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?
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"
Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?
Not babies, embyros
If a person's criticism is of "ethics" in general, that individual should not be allowed in a position of authority or trust. If you have a specific constraint for which you can make a case that it goes too far and hinders responsible science and growth (and would have repeatable, reliable results), then state the specific point clearly and the arguments in your favor.
This argument applies just as well to libertarians who oppose "regulation." There are some truly insane libertarians who want all regulation gone, but a lot of people who say they are opposed to "regulation" really mean that they want to add more barriers to adding regulation, and repeal some known-to-be-problematic regulations. I'm sure that when this person says "ethics" is holding back scientific progress, he means the latter. To assert he just means getting rid of "ethics" entirely is absurd. There is only so much detail you can put in a tweet.
I mean, he was imprisoned for genetic experimentation on babies without informing the parents or basically anyone else. So... I don't think he means that in a specific way. He wants to do whatever he feels like without oversight.
So if we put these extra pair of legs on babies then they can stand in more extreme angles making them better at construction at a time when there is a housing shortage
And we already have a safety valve for when conventional ethics is standing in the way of vital research: the researchers test on themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine
If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?
It's not terribly common because most useful research is perfectly ethical, but we have a good number of cases of researchers deciding that there's no way for someone to ethically volunteer for what they need to do, so they do it to themselves. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they make very valuable discoveries. Sometimes both.
So the next time someone wantz to strap someone to a rocket engine and fire it into a wall, all they have to do is go first and be part of the testing pool.
Best I can do is generalization
my type of guy. And he still does his research to help people even with the public treating him like it does.
HJK: Many years ago, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and unfortunately, there are no medicines available to cure it. There are many more people who are suffering from diseases that do not have a cure, so I want to do something to change it.
CT: Can you tell us about the research that you led around Lulu and Nana that was publicized in 2018? It’s been almost six years since this research was shared with the world, how are they doing now?
HJK: Lulu and Nana’s parents are HIV infected patients and they want to have a baby, a healthy baby, a baby that is not worried about HIV any more. So we took the sperm and egg from their parents during the IVF procedure, using a tiny syringe needle to inject the gene editing formula to the fertilized egg, to change one gene, and closed the door that HIV virus used to enter human cell. We then transfer the fertilized egg from the peri dish back to their mother’s uterus, and after several months, Lulu and Nana were born. Lulu and Nana are five years old now and they are healthy and happy just like any other kids in the kindergarten. I am glad that I have helped two families using my science knowledge.
CT: How did you balance the need for progressive gene editing research with ethics and general public perception?
HJK: Science research must be transparent and open, and should be approved by an ethics committee composed of medical doctors, lawyers, patient representatives, and local resident representatives.
CT: Last month, the FDA approved a new CRISPR gene editing treatment, Casgevy, by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, for sickle cell disease. To give context to the audience, sickle-cell is caused by inheriting two bad copies of one of the genes that make hemoglobin. On top of severe symptoms, life expectancy with the disease is just 53 years and it affects 1 in 4,000 people in the US. However, sources are reporting the gene editing treatment price will be $2-3m USD per patient. First, can you tell us your thoughts on this FDA approval milestone and what it means for gene-editing based medicines? And second, do you see a future where the prices for gene therapies will be lowered, making them more accessible to patients?
HJK: The approval of Casgevy is a great success for science, but not for patients. It cost more than 2 million dollars, and few patients will be able to afford it. This drug also has significant side effects including infertility.
CT: Gene therapies aside, what are your thoughts on the current state of affairs of genomics-based reproductive technologies, such as embryo gene sequencing? How do you foresee reproductive technologies being transformed by genomics in the future?
HJK: Embryo gene sequencing such as PGT-P is not ready for clinic application. Many diseases such as diabetes are influenced by hundreds of genes, and we do not have solid science to determine the risk of diabetes by genomic information.
CT:I see. So you think it's still a little bit early for clinic use.
HJK: Yes.
CT: What are your aspirations for the next chapter of your scientific career?
HJK: I believe embryo gene editing can help us to defeat many diseases and improve human health. I have proposed a research project, using embryo gene editing to help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, so our next generation will no longer worry about Alzheimer’s. I am going to do it slowly and cautiously, make sure we comply with all local laws and the international ethics guidelines. We are going to do it in a mouse first and we have no plan to move on to human trials. At every step, we will disclose our progress in full to the whole world and post it in my personal social account on Twitter.
CT: Why focus on Alzheimer's?
HJK: As I said, my mother has Alzheimer's. So personally, I also have some high risk for Alzheimer's when I get old, and maybe my daughters are at risk of having it in the future too, and Alzheimer's has no cure. If this project is successful, perhaps Alzheimer’s disease can be completely eliminated from future generations.
CT: Wow. That would be very powerful if it’s successful – to be able to get rid of a disease in future generations. I have another question. If you could go back in time to 2018, would you have done anything differently?
HJK: I did it too quickly. One thing I did not finish is the health insurance. In the informed consent document we signed with the parents of Lulu and Nana, we agreed to buy additional health insurance for Lulu and Nana. However, after the birth of Lulu and Nana, due to too much negative media attention, no health insurance company wanted to get involved. Now, as an alternative, I am planning to set up a charity foundation in Singapore to raise money to cover any future medical expenses of Lulu and Nana.
CT: Let me know if you have a link to donations for the charity. I'd be happy to share it with interested individuals.
HJK: Thank you. That'd be great.
CT: What are some valuable lessons that you learned over the last few years that you can share with the viewers?
HJK: In the past few years, my wife and daughters were living in a hard time. In the future, I won’t let my family get into the same situation again.
CT: I'm sorry to hear that about your family. Thank you so much for answering all of my questions, Dr. He.
HJK: Thank you.
I applaud how nearly every time he opens his mouth it is something caring about the wellbeing of others and his goals are noble. Where I am critical of He is that he seems to be such an idealist that when he cures these big diseases he assumes the next step is to roll out the cure to all people of the world. I love how he is against the 'charge 2million per cure' mentality and thinks cures should be available to all, but imo the risk level of doing a genetic change to the entire population is unacceptable. A single wrong unforseen thing and its like zombie apocalypse. I see from his personality why he rushed ahead and did the Lulu Nana antiHIV thing. Personally I think he should be spearheading embryo science and doing his stuff since his heart is good, but watched over so he doesnt go too far. Let him go farther than anyone else, beyond lulu nana, but watch him carefully so no zombie apocalypse.
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
you have my upvote
and my axe
"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.
Then why isn't the speed limit 0 everywhere? Speed limits are a balance between two opposing concerns.
In this case, ethics is holding back life-saving treatments. Ethics boards should approve gene editing more than they currently do.
I'm not arguing that ethics boards cant be overly stringent. But there's a reason we have them in the first place and that still doesn't make it alright to start conducting unauthorised experiments on people.
Even if it turned out OK in this case, and we still can't say that it definitely did, the next person who trys to pull a stunt like this might not be so lucky, qualified, or knowledgable.
What's the alternative here?
Unit 731 is the truly horrible source of a lot of modern medical knowledge
Can you explain what Unit 731 has to do with Dr. He?
I doubt it has anything to do with him. My comment was in reference to the context of the post, whereby medical experimentation on humans is being regarded as progress and being held back by ethics.
Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before, specially on war times. 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 emotional capacity than other people due to mental limitations.
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.
From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.
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 confirm one's bias - I mean, just look at how people tried to justify until decades ago a black person's 'inferiority' and their discrimination by coming up with all sorts of anatomical observations. That's the danger.
Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.
Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.
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.
wait he's not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher
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.
Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error.
To be fair, testicles aren't designed for that task.
A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.
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, poisoned data tho
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?
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
aren't there literally studies about the size that only accepted measurements by medical professionals?
Yes, and they have the problems outlined above.
Holy shit, this guy managed to have 3 of the first 10 papers listed on google scholar about his shenanigans.
Watch Star Trek
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.
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.
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.
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."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
To back up your point that the research gained by unit 731 was useless.
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.
I think the only thing that deserves clarification is if he broke ethics to do biomedical research. It sure seems he did. There's ethics approval in any study for a good reason.
Wasn't he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?
Protogen has entered the chat
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
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…
"You're not that guy"
...
"I am that guy 💥"
Hot take.: He is right though.
I am sure you have examples of situations where lower ethical standards led to much faster progress in research.
Unfortunately, research on prisoners and concentration camp victims did produce new valuable medical information.
Most of the field of gynecology is based on experiments done on women slaves, where the "doctors" decided their victims conveniently didn't have nerve endings.
Ethics throttles research.
But I am aghast at the thought that we should permit unethical research in the pursuit of, at the end of the day, greed.
And I say this as a professional scientist.
I can't believe this conversation is even necessary.
This is obvious though --- currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.
...but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn't care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you "believe" in it, which is the beautiful thing about science --- so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)
Now, taking a step back, maybe you're right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that's getting into a whole "sociology of science" discussion.
Many kinds of early-in-life medical interventions can have permanent negative effects if they go bad, but nonetheless our ethical standards don't preclude them. This is a field where the ethical standards are suffocatingly high without good reason. As an aside, we should consider euthanizing newborns who suffer debilitatingly severe negative side effects due to any kind of failed medical intervention (with parental consent, of course). This will directly improve quality-of-life standards and also allow us to lower ethical standards on experimental treatments too.
Testing testing. Running an example instance. Please ignore this OP :>
I SEE YOU
GODSPEED 🫡
I won't ignore this.
Running a lemmy instance on a free ngrok tunnel lmao thats weird
Seriously tho, save some money and get yourself a domain and a static ip address. It will make things much easier
Dr He's dream of baby gladiators cannot be hindered by whiny-don't-make-the-babies-fight so-called "ethics"!
Imagine what the world has lost
Better build a research base on Mars where legal and ethical limitations don't exist. And IDK, start researching teleportation or something.
Preferably just die because he opened a portal to hell or something.
This could be a good meme template.
I know him!!! He featured heavily in that one Walter Isaacson biography, The Codebreaker. About Dr. Doudna of course.
Did he get his PHD? Well, good on him. I see China has a better anti-recidivism program than the USA has. Last I heard, he was doing hard time in Chinese prison for mad scientist stuff.
He got his PhD in 2010, he was imprisoned 2020 - 2023
Haha, well, that shows my reading comprehension level!
Listen I'm generally pro rehabilitation but lete not let embezzlers start banks
Just a dash of Mengele
Damn lol. I'd say call an ambulance for the guy but it looks like he's already in a hospital
Ooof..
Average CCP party member
He's right
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.
Where do you feel Chinese ethics lack compared to American ethics?
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.
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.
