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China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials (wsj.com)
U.S. scientists helped devise the Crispr biotechnology tool. First to test it in humans are Chinese doctors (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative link). WSJ reports: In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool. U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven't been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn't the case for Dr. Wu and others in China. In a quirk of the globalized technology arena, Dr. Wu can forge ahead with the tool because he faces few regulatory hurdles to testing it on humans. [...] There is little doubt China was first out of the block testing Crispr on humans. Nine trials in China are listed in a U.S. National Library of Medicine database. The Wall Street Journal found at least two other hospital trials, including one beginning in 2015 -- a year earlier than previously reported. Journal reporting found at least 86 Chinese patients have had their genes edited.
Behold the future.
I guess by the 23rd century we'll know how bad it was ;)
" Replicants are like any other machine, are either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit it's not my problem."
America doesn't win anymore
China's curing cancer, and we can't even keep our government in operation
But at least we'll get girls with cat ears! =)
Unhampered by "Job Killing" rules like clean air, clean water, intellectual property, and child labor laws, China has claimed top global growth rankings for the past 2 decades...
Now live with it... or try anyway.
Considering it's behavior, the Chinese government clearly holds little regard for human life. That said, if someone has a fatal prognosis then they should be able to volunteer for experimental treatments under the condition that they accept that the treatment will likely result in a painful death and part or all of their body may be used kept to study and understand what went wrong with the treatment. However, the volunteer should be given the option of euthanasia should they wish to have it (to avoid the horrible painful death part).
Human experimentation is gruesome business and should not be taken lightly. It may be your only option aside from death but it's good to remember that a horrible painful death is a likely outcome.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So, at least we know where the zombie apocalypse starts.
We REGULATE because we care about the harm evil corporations will do to people.
And fuck you if you're on your death bed, you're NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE YOUR OWN DECISION. It's for your own good!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Mengele would have loved you.
There goes everyone else's chance in the Olympics. In 20 years China will be hip-deep in engineered super-human athletes and people that look like Michael Jackson.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
And fuck you if you're on your death bed, you're NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE YOUR OWN DECISION. It's for your own good!
It's not just for your own good. We don't really know what these gene altering technologies will do-- either on a technical scientific level, or on a sociological level. Lots of technologies seem harmless enough at the outset, and people ask, "What could possibly go wrong?" Part of the problem is, the things that go wrong are often not things we even suspected might go wrong.
China proper doesn't have a a completely free market. The government has been fairly hands off in a lot of areas, but they still have rules related to foreign investment and how much of a company can be owned by outside investors. They also manipulate their currency in a way that makes a lot of their industries vastly more competitive than they would be otherwise.
However, Hong Kong (and some of the similar economic zones within China) has what is regarded as the world's freest market. (PDF Warning)
I, for one, welcome our new genetically engineered Chinese overlords!
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
If you're willing to spend the rest of your life in isolation, and the experimenting company is willing to foot the bill for that, then I say it's fine. Otherwise, your decision doesn't only affect you. If you, for instance, receive a gene modification intended to cure cancer that goes rogue and causes the common cold to start causing cancer, then you become patient zero for a new, man-made plague. And there's a whole lot of really awful shit between that and "harmless but ineffective."
If your decision has only binary outcomes and only impacts you, then go for it. If your decision has even the potential for broader impact, and you're ignoring that for personal satisfaction, then you're a terrible person, and instead of receiving experimental treatment, you should be euthanized for the betterment of humanity.
Our more cautious approach to human experimentation will, in the long run, be the end of us as a scientific superpower when it comes to this kind of stuff.
It also doesn't help that our government is increasingly politicizing science with one side being quite anti-science. Seemingly we will count on other countries to do the innovation.
Monsanto being Umbrella Corporation is so Last Thursday, China is now the new hotness in being Umbrella Corporation! Look for a zombie apocalypse near you, in the next 10-20 years!
In all seriousness: enjoy your possible human-caused genetic diseases as you recklessly tinker with human DNA. Oh and by the way so far as I'm concerned if you create genetic diseases that are communicable, and it causes a pandemic? I vote for nuking your entire fucking country over it.
Seriously, at the rate we're going, we may not be around long enough for climate change to kill us. Guess we'll see if I'm right or wrong won't we?
On the one hand, it is wrong to enslave everyone else because you have some fantasy about what *might* happen. On the other hand, things bite back and things might happen as you say, like a runaway virus or something. The problem is, how likely does the threat have to be before we can justify taking people's fundamental rights away from them? That's the catch isn't it? In this case, AFAIK, there isn't really much chance of something going wrong and affecting other people. It's not like they are making custom nanoprobes or viruses, is it?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
China proper doesn't have a a completely free market. The government has been fairly hands off in a lot of areas
No, the Chinese government has its hand IN all areas. I know a Chinese businessperson who gave up there and moved to the US. He said in China about half of his time, mental energy, and money was used up placating officials at multiple levels. Government's involvement in business in the US is practically nothing in comparison.
You probably shouldn't joke about that these days.
Sure, tell yourself that when everybody without Han ancestry drops dead
I'm sure they'll "passover" the people with Mongol and Manchu ancestry too which should spare quite a few non-chinese given the altan urag...
OTOH, it probably wouldn't hurt to mark the doorposts of your house with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb to cover your bases...
people ask, "What could possibly go wrong?"
In most instances, the answer is "nothing". Gene therapy on a dying patient past reproductive age is going to affect no one but the patient.
Part of the problem is, the things that go wrong are often not things we even suspected might go wrong.
You can use this same argument to ban anyone from doing anything.
Some reasonable regulations would be acceptable, but America has WAY too much of a bias toward "doing nothing". We are letting the future slip away from us in so many ways.
My daughter is a biotechnology major at the University of California. She applied for an internship for the coming summer. Many of her classmates had every application rejected, but she was offered well paid internships by four companies. Why? She speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese.
This isn't the dumbest reply I've ever seen.
You must browse at a higher comment level than most.
I can't wait to see what all they cure. I am also a little worried for those it fails on, or damages. Their blood will pave the way for a brighter future, as often happens to those under communist rule.
And their population-curbing cancer-gene-enabled bioweapons
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"enslave" people? We're talking about regulations that were enacted so that a medical technique has a statistically significant chance of success with little to no chance of creating greater damage/death to the individual. It's to prevent people from selling snake oil to dying individuals who will do or pay anything for a chance to live. Because the only thing that separates a quack from an actual scientist are *the studies and research*
Worst he can do is pass the gene onto his kid, any kind of gene transfer to another organism could just as easily (which is to say, not easily at all) occur in animals or plants which are open season for genetic experiments.
This has no more broader impact that parents being able to decide to have their kids undergo hormone treatment (which is to say, some).
I think this one's a tough call. Gene editing could hold the key to curing some incurable diseases but it could also produce a moral issue where it's used for eugenics instead. People after all are willing to alter themselves for vain reasons but is that right? I think there's a slightly lesser risk of disease outbreak unless government is doing hostile black ops research but don't expect zombies or anything like that. Think more a plague outbreak.
Science is a double-edged sword, think nuclear science. It's given us so many modern technologies we take for granted but also it's also given us a chance to blow ourselves off the planet. Genetics is probably similar.
What was Clarke's law? Something something 'sufficiently advanced technology...'
Now, I'm not saying Jesus was an alien... but...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
However, Hong Kong (and some of the similar economic zones within China) has what is regarded as the world's freest market. (PDF Warning)
Only if you discount Somalia, which I presume the "free market" evangelists do.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Mengele experimented on healthy people that did not give consent and the experiments were not intended to help them at all.
That is a tiny weeny bit different, but it takes two brain-cells to rub together to see that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When the wars start, remember all this when I'm shoving a nine-inch stiletto into your left eye socket, you fat ass disgusting piece of shit. All of you are going to DIE and I'll personally take as many of you out as I possibly can FOR THE GOOD OF MY SPECIES.
Fortunately for the rest of us, your side is not the one with the guns and the organization.
This attitude is why today's China, but not us, can have nice things.
Mengele would have loved you.
When you run out of arguments against something, invoke Nazism.
Mengele did not experiment on cancerous volunteers.
Thankfully, the FDA was slow to approve it.
Fortunately for the rest of us, your side has the guns but at the same time believes corporate media bullshit to keep them complacent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh, that's not why. That attitude is why China, not us, are drowning in smog.
Dude, stop watching SciFi shows. If you can't tell fiction from reality, stick to the Little House on the Prairie
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why not?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why future? Has it ever been different?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We REGULATE because we care about the harm evil corporations will do to people.
Well, two points.
First, at this point, we don't know whether gene therapies will help or harm. Past trials turned out to be ineffective or harmful. There are plausible reasons to believe this time will be different. We won't know until people conduct careful (and likely expensive and time consuming) experiments. In the mean time, people are dying. I'm glad I don't have to decide which approach will kill the most people.
Anyway.
My second point is a broad political one. Politicians and regulators say we regulate to protect people, either from evil companies or more likely plain ignorance. But stated intentions aren't real intentions and certainly aren't outcomes. There's a common story these days that much regulation has the predominant effect of protecting incumbents from competition at the expense of consumers. I'm sure there's more than one drug company or AMA lobbyist pushing for regulation ostensibly for safety but really to protect a revenue stream. I'd prefer to think doctors are above that but they're human too with student loans to pay off.
This is actually an example illustrating my point. China's force-draft industrialization gave them a problem with coal smog and CO2, so now they in the lead on nuclearizing their way out of the problem. We can barely finish a couple of plants we started in the Seventies.
Damn straight, we should absolutely allow unproven and experimental techniques to be used that will expose the patient to immense pain and immediate death.
Do you realize at all how experimental this stuff is? They haven't even done it on MICE yet. Crisper was developed like 3 years ago. They are still experimenting with bacteria. You think the appropriate action is to jump right to humans?
What you might not know is someone jumped to humans a decade ago without proper protocols, someone experimenting with viruses rewriting someone's DNA killed a 20 year old volunteer in the US. He spent an agonizing 24hrs in intensive care with total organ failure before he died.
The problem is we don't even understand the implications of using CRISPR on live people let alone live animals yet. You could immediately kill the person.
Natural gene transfer with viruses is hardly unheard of - something like 8% of the human genome is viral in origin, and it can reasonably be expected that the reverse happens as well. After all, they do hijack our own DNA replication equipment in the course of their normal reproduction. It may be spectacularly unlikely that any given gene will be incorporated (much less have a related effect), but the sheer number of viruses involved in a single infection improve those odds considerably.
There's also the question of how the CRISPR molecules are introduced to the nucleus of the cells - a viral "carrier" is one technique, in which case you may now be infected with modified viruses with the potential to pass on the changes to other people as well. I recall one study where modified viruses were used to introduce photoreceptor-producing genes to specific kinds of brain cells - and the researchers were quick to point out that their chosen virus was harmless, rarely even causing noticeable symptoms. What they failed to address was that it WAS harmless, but now caused brain cells to grow photoreceptors - with unknown long term consequences, not to mention the potential developmental consequences if it infected a developing embryo.
Plus, there's environmental factors as well - alter the ecosystem (body), you alter its inhabitants. The bigger point is that we're just barely getting a grasp on the immediate consequences of gene editing (i.e., managing to make the functional changes we desire), and have yet to even seriously consider the second-order and further consequences that may ripple out from those changes. That would be fine so long as potential repercussions stopped with the patient, but become societies concern when we haven't even begun to ask the question of what can go wrong.
And before you dismiss that out of hand, consider that with all the years of Cas9/CRISPR research that has been done, as of last year there had been only *one* study done involving full gene-sequencing of the subjects to look for "off-target" modifications, and they found lots of them. Now, there were some serious shortcomings in the study that call it's results into question, but it still stands as the *only* serious study into immediate unintended modifications. In that kind of reckless environment, we need outside regulations to help limit the potential damage being done.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm not suggesting they give a dying person a shot and send them home - what kind of morons am I talking to here?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Ahh.... I see what kind of morons I'm talking to. Your reply clarifies it for me.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
"Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem." - Deckard
#DeleteFacebook
That was mainly because they gave him an overdoze and he got an allergic shock. ... but it does not mean the gen editing had worked.
Completely preventable
BTW: https://www.google.de/search?q...
500k hits ...
You are a decade behind in CRISPR research.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The Chinese currency is bound to the US dollar.
Since decades. See: no manipulation at all, besides the ones the US do to put the dollar into a certain position, just thats the Chinese currency automatically follows.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That's not why, though. It's like saying "the reason the addict is clean is because he overdosed." Even if that experience motivated him to get clean, lots of other people stay clean without having ever overdosed. The addict could have stopped doing drugs at any time without overdosing.
In the same way, America could have been investing in better power sources and infrastructure, but we've just chosen not to. There's a segment of the population that's still insisting that we go back to coal. Until we figure out a way to get rid of these morons, we're going to fall behind. And to your point, it's possible that pursuing bunch of moronic short-sighted goals will create enough of a disaster that we'll be forced to learn our lesson. Performing genetic engineering willy-nilly might end up with us figuring out how to be more careful in the long run. It'd be nice if we could just not be moronic without causing those disasters first.
extreme left and extreme right are 2 sides of the same coin. both think they are the smartest and know the best way to do everything is their bigoted way.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
For example. Plus the media bullshit that tells you all these tell you are lies but they don't lie.
The fun bit is that ALL sides lie to you. It's your job to find the truth within those lies.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm going to steal that cliche. There are so many places on this murderous forum where I can use that.
Utilitarian viewpoints usually fall short. This one did too. As a result of his actions a lot of research was later not conducted when it actually could have done with reasonable cost/benefit to all involved.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And fuck you if you're on your death bed, you're NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE YOUR OWN DECISION. It's for your own good!
It's not just for your own good. We don't really know what these gene altering technologies will do-- either on a technical scientific level, or on a sociological level. Lots of technologies seem harmless enough at the outset, and people ask, "What could possibly go wrong?" Part of the problem is, the things that go wrong are often not things we even suspected might go wrong.
And if you mutate my genes / dna what will my descendents have for theirs, if my wife becomes pregnant? Or if her dna was modified before she got pregnant?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada