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Chinese Scientist Who Gene-Edited Babies Fired by University (reuters.com)
A Chinese scientist who created what he said were the world's first "gene-edited" babies evaded oversight and broke ethical boundaries in a quest for fame and fortune, state media said on Monday, as his former university said he had been fired.
From a report: He Jiankui said in November that he used a gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls born that month, sparking an international outcry about the ethics and safety of such research. Hundreds of Chinese and international scientists condemned He and said any application of gene editing on human embryos for reproductive purposes was unethical. Chinese authorities also denounced He and issued a temporary halt to research activities involving the editing of human genes.
He had "deliberately evaded oversight" with the intent of creating a gene-edited baby "for the purpose of reproduction," according to the initial findings of an investigating team set up by the Health Commission of China in southern Guangdong province, Xinhua news agency reported. [...] The Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in the city of Shenzhen, said in a statement on its website that He had been fired.
He had "deliberately evaded oversight" with the intent of creating a gene-edited baby "for the purpose of reproduction," according to the initial findings of an investigating team set up by the Health Commission of China in southern Guangdong province, Xinhua news agency reported. [...] The Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in the city of Shenzhen, said in a statement on its website that He had been fired.
Maybe he can get a job at Google or Facebook or whatever tech company that puts profits and fame above humanity.
Condemned by the authorities... this guy is probably already on his way to a secret government lab to make super babies.
Don't get me wrong this is a line we couldn't ethically cross but since he already crossed it... we should see the results and gather the data. Slap an ankle bracelet on him and have the facility take over his expenses so the lights stay on but he doesn't profit or have someone else pick up his work.
There are potentially some amazing advances that could come from this line of research.
Also, do you honestly think the likes of Putin and other regimes don't have underground activities of this sort ongoing but obviously can't publish. The genie is out of the bottle. I would be surprised if the US military doesn't have secret programs along these lines going already.
If you've ever been to China, you see people breaking rules all the time, unless there is a clear way they'd be caught. Then they all act like angels.
I have video of grandmas jumping lines that were hours long, then waving their 20 relatives up.
I have video of a high school student climbing into a 2nd story school window to turn in a late assignment to the instructor's desk.
The lack of "character" is an epidemic in mainland China, being lead from the top by dictator-for life Xi, you know, Pooh Bear. (he loves that)!
Sounds like He was playing God ...
like, reproducing the baby over and over or reproducing with the baby to insert the gene into the larger pool?
Repairing broken DNA before it has the chance to reproduce itself is not unethical. What is unethical is developing the science and the methods in a vacuum without any peer review or oversight.
There is nothing unethical about using the latest medical technology to treat and cure disease. Gene editing is simply the next step in our progress.
He has a really confusing first name for english readers.
Too bad this person's name isn't Dr. Sarina Kaur. Because then they would end up in a desert region of India creating Khan!
He's group website had PDFs relating to the approval of his research. The wayback machine provides us with a handy view just before he announced his GM children and got silenced. Later that approval was retroactively withdrawn.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181126212100/http://www.sustc-genome.org.cn/source/pdf/HarmoniCare-Ethics-English.pdf
From what I can gather, this was a privately owned hospital providing "ethical approval" for government sponsored research. I find it hard to believe he was operating without somebody knowing about it - they recruited HIV positive fathers, got them to agree to participate with their partners, performed artificial insemination, applied CRISPR to the embryos, implanted them in the mothers, performed an abundance of testing during the pregnancies and sequenced the children. That's an awful lot of expertise and equipment to bring to bear.
A report on their website indicates that the edits only took for one child, and there were quite a few off-target edits from the post-CRISPR repair, as well as evidence of mosaicism. That's one dodgy outcome! He did bad things, but I strongly suspect he was not the only one culpable here. Is he now the scapegoat for a much larger failure of oversight?
For probably as long as humans have been able to communicate, they expressed the desire to take on the traits of others around them. Strength, speed, looks, intelligence... But the scientific systematic understanding of the menutica involved. Early attempts became frustrated when nothing worked and more and more radical means were tested infringing on the well being of innocents while bringing no actual change of benefit. Obviously eugenics works, poodles aren't found in the wild, but attempting to force people to breed against thier will, for authoritarian purposes, dosent work out well for the obvious reasons and still the principles were not well understood. This has poisoned the well to the point common wisdom is any change is bad, even attempting anything is both fruitless at best and worse - just going to cause far more problems than it solves.
But the reality is once these technologies become widespread and ubiquitous, effective and cheap, possibly even reversable as the tech matures, they won't fall under the original assumptions of why they are bad. I myself have a severe dietary condition, a delayed bleeding disorder, and nearly debilitating migraines and would definately allow these to be edited out of my children, it's not wrong and god helps those who help themselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with it as it is possible to form a moral framework. Eventually it will be possible to change things like skin and hair color, then likely even reversible at any age (including heritablity). Perhaps this will even be seen eventually as a positive thing, in a similar fashion to the Dr.Seuss story about how many stars on your belly denotes social status and they only wake up when the mobility between these states illustrates they are only skin deep.
The guy should be getting a job "for life" unless the baby ends up coming out horribly deformed and with 10 kinds of illness.
Until then, they should be sucking his dick and be grateful that someone finally had the balls to push it forward.
Yes, Crispr-cas9 is a bit risky. It is hit-or-miss as to whether it will be an exact edit, but if you work at it hard enough you can minimize the risks considerably.
Also, most of the risk is involved in editing large sets of cells, not ONE.
HUGE difference in risk. Sun-Earth vs Sun-Alpha Centauri difference.
Also, yes, we don't 100% understand how some genes work, but we do know how plenty of them work through trial and error knocking-them-out and seeing the results. We know a great deal of functionality through this method.
Unethical my fucking ass. We give all kinds of animals horrible (albeit short) lives in the name of science. Take your "b-b-but it's a human!" nonsense and fuck right off. Right off to the fucking heavens and beyond.
Don't even pretend we're above him, you pretentious fucks. I dare you to try defend giving rats all kinds of tumors and diseases, then attack this guy for the exact same thing.
I'm sick of this "humans are better than animals fuck them let them suffer" mentality in science. It's scummy and actually unethical!
No, "germ-line edits" is not an argument. It's going to happen sooner or later. Deal with it. Germ-line edits are vastly easier to control when you fully understand how sets of genes work and the ramifications of disabling them. We know more than I can count.
Millions are born with severe genetic disabilities every year. Come back when you've had to deal with it personally and not just "another patient" and see how you feel.
It's not the 90s any more. We know much more now. Don't even pretend we are clueless. We're still playing bowling, but we're also getting consistently better strikes when we pay attention.
The guy deserves an award.
Because this is how you make mad scientists.
Unethical? I'm not so sure......Was he wreckless? Sure.
I am: being reckless with human lives is unethical.
Another medical article, about which computer scientists think they are as well positioned to comment as much as they do about one about Active Directory, ranting about systemd etc.
Oh I forgot - the issue is that they were Chinese. Aah.
Poor quality comments. Enjoy
Bullshit. He's property of the Chinese government now.
He was fired for being dumb enough to admit it / being caught.
we all know very well how this is going to work eventually somebody will completely ignore ethics and complete the research necessary on humans, will all condemned them while taking their research and going off very interesting. in the future will be built off that. Just like most every other major medical advance.
idiot rich Chinese will pay him to edit a smart or tall baby as soon as he can set up shop.
Chinese and ethics? lol no.
Chinese culture has an ugly, savage aspect: the typical Chinese ignores ethical issues in his pursuit of fame and fortune.
Just before the techniques of genetic engineering became commercially widespread, the general public in the West debated the ethics of such techniques. The debates appeared on radio and in print media.
Such debates never appeared in Chinese society in China, Taiwan, or Singapore.
A Chinese scientist will likely be the first scientist to create a hybrid of a human being and a chimpanzee.
Chinese morality rapes Western notions of human decency.
Get more info about this issue.
For these twin girls babies, we need proofs of
1st: should be sacrificed?
2nd: to create an impediment of any experimentation for observation of hers?
3rd: to destroy and end their genetic roadmaps.
It's not from God.
It's humans creating anomalies for humans.
Chinese culture has an ugly, savage aspect: the typical Chinese ignores ethical issues in his pursuit of fame and fortune.
Just before the techniques of genetic engineering became commercially widespread, the general public in the West debated the ethics of such techniques. The debates appeared on radio and in print media.
Such debates never appeared in Chinese society in China, Taiwan, or Singapore.
A Chinese scientist will likely be the first scientist to create a hybrid of a human being and a chimpanzee.
Chinese morality rapes Western notions of human decency.
Get more info about this issue.
as a monoculture, we'd all die of the same "potato blight" or similar.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"I'm all for safety for drugs reaching the public, but surely we can quicken the pace in the research field far before it becomes publically available?"
The first clause of this sentence contradicts the second clause. Please restate the premise.
Otherwise, no.
A student doesn't need to shimmy up to the window to turn in a late assignment because the instructor will accept a late assignment, on any excuse offered or for no excuse at all?
so who is the representative of "god" that gets to decide Yes/No whether an idea can be tested on humans
My first guess is the parts of the government that pay for disability and medical entitlements. They may have to cover lifelong costs of the results of the experiment.
Did you ever wonder how Chinese parents name their children?
They just throw a bunch of silverware down the stairs!
CHING CHONG! BING BONG! WANG DING!
Amiright???
fired from the university
hired by the army.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Everyone knows this eugenics program was one of the goals of the nazi party right?
Regardless of what you think of gene editing, you've got to acknowledge that this was the goal of purism and what people today call "supremacy"
The perfect human
It's interesting to see people accept the concept while simultaneously rioting againt shadow Nazis, like they never had an original thought of their own
I can tell you it would be a terrible idea, because when there aren't obvious visible differences, people will choose to persecute on the more subtle physical ones (such as lisp or accent), then religion, then class or culture.
A more homogenous society would just make us collectively less suited to survive in any environment we might need to, lose us genes and mutations that are beneficial in different regions of the world, and run the risk of a deadly disease wiping the whole population out instead of hitting an immunity barrier due to different genetics.
The solution to the persecution side of things is to push more equality while at the same time not overplaying the hand. One of the dangers of 'taking back' terms, rather than helping them fall into disuse is that you are now excluding one group of people from using them while empowering another to, creating the exact sort of power imbalance that created the problem in the first place. If we are trying to create a freer world with less persecution the first step is ensuring everyone is equally enfranchised and no one becomes disenfranchised because of oversights that simply push the pendulum too far in the other direction.
The SJW vs moderates vs alt-right are an example of this. Another example is looking at how feminism is repressing women who don't want to be anything more than housewives, while at the same time working to emasculate men, rather than finding a way to provide masculine examples of taking on work which has become tainted as being too 'womanly' for a man to do.
Resolve these sorts of conflicts and any holdouts should only last a generation or two, or come to congregate in their own isolated communities where they can be left to their own lives without bothering the rest of us.