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China Halts Work by Team on Gene-Edited Babies (apnews.com)
China's government ordered a halt Thursday to work by a medical team that claimed to have helped make the world's first gene-edited babies, as a group of leading scientists declared that it's still too soon to try to make permanent changes to DNA that can be inherited by future generations. AP reports: Chinese Vice Minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping told state broadcaster CCTV that his ministry is strongly opposed to the efforts that reportedly produced twin girls born earlier this month. Xu called the team's actions illegal and unacceptable and said an investigation had been ordered, but made no mention of specific actions taken. Researcher He Jiankui claims to have altered the DNA of the twins to try to make them resistant to infection with the AIDS virus. Mainstream scientists have condemned the experiment, and universities and government groups are investigating. His experiment "crossed the line of morality and ethics adhered to by the academic community and was shocking and unacceptable," Xu said. A group of leading scientists gathered in Hong Kong this week for an international conference on gene editing, the ability to rewrite the code of life to try to correct or prevent diseases.
Perhaps it's also a matter of pride. Sure the technology is cool, but you don't want the world to believe that "your best of the best" are genetically engineered humans and not natural talent. (after all, Asians generally do quite well on those "education tests" that show which countries' students are the smartest of the lot, or educated, or whatever. Whether or not it's a valid test (North American generally only does "OK", behind Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia) is a question for another day).
Last thing anyone would want is to have the world believe that your students are "smart" because you've genetically engineered them to be so and that among people of "natural birth" they don't do so well. In other words, to make their students appear better, China cheated.
Fake science is everywhere, false claims are made everywhere*
Yes, fake science occurs everywhere, but not at the same levels. I have lived in China, and I am married to a Chinese woman, and I can tell you that lying and deception is far more tolerated in their culture than it is in America.
(* Favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Poor example. This was a Japanese researcher who's fraud was exposed by Japan's own scientific community. Their internal system fixed the problem.
That happens less frequently in China, where fraud is often only exposed when the claims are big enough to draw international scrutiny. And even then, China will make a show of punishing the one offender, often harshly, rather than reforming the system.
Lying badly and getting caught has a social cost, everywhere.
Not really. China is a low trust society. Chinese people don't trust each other, they expect others to try to cheat them, and if they think they can get away with cheating others, they are often willing to try.
But this also means that dishonesty is so widespread that they have no choice but to tolerate it. If an employee is fired every time they are caught lying/cheating/stealing, the company will soon have no workers and be out of business. So instead, they use one of two solutions: 1) Hire only your own family. This is common in China, and is a reason why they have many many tiny companies, a few gigantic SOEs, and almost nothing in between. 2) Have excessive cross checks and controls. In many Chinese department stores, a checker totals up your items and bags them, then gives you a receipt, and then you go to a separate cashier desk to actually pay. This way the owner has to trust or monitor only the one cashier, and not the six checkers.
I don't trust my fellow Americans or Germans (dual citizen).
Do you buy products without opening the box first to see if it is full of sawdust?
Do you wear a knapsack on your back in a crowd, rather than shifting it around to your chest so no one slices the bottom with a razor?
Do you share information with your co-workers, even when you are not required to do so?
Do you feed your baby domestically produced baby formula?
If you do any of these things, then you trust your fellow citizens more than Chinese do.