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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.
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.
He has a really confusing first name for english readers.
Forget super babies, can they make catgirls yet?
Or hired by the Indian government to make a superior clone of Ricardo Montalban or Benedict Cumberbatch.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
KHAAAAAAAAAN!!!
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.
Unethical? I'm not so sure......Was he wreckless? Sure.
I am: being reckless with human lives is unethical.
Forget super babies, can they make catgirls yet?
That's the Japanese, not the Chinese. Or at least not so much...
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.
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?
You make the assumption that we understand what we are doing. What are you going to do when some super virus mutates and only people with Toxoplasma gondii parasite in their brains survive it? Clearly all parasites are bad, why? Because it's right there in their names, "parasites". The conversation always comes to changing eye or hair color when talking about gene editing (you read those stories right? I know me too) but do you realize how profound a change that is even to simply change someone into a blonde from a brunette? You're talking about a baby who is the product of millions of years of fighting to see which genes even survive to get their protein and at the end of the battle you're just going to Dumbledore the victor? Hell there might be that single moment where this one person just digs green eyes, but because of your editing they never fall for each other and that one meiosis which would have created the first ebola immune baby never comes to be. Not to mention the psychological effects. While we have something called surgical addiction, you want to allow gene editing on humans? How long until a baby is killed because the parents thought it didn't turn out the way they wanted and they wanted a new one to edit properly this time and they blame the doctor? Fine you say, lets just focus on itemizing the pros and cons, okay. Some of the cons include 7 billion unedited humans. Accidents beyond our current understanding, (read whoops, sorry about the tumor) people must live with much like accidently getting their babies penis entirely chopped off during circumcision, but with a whole new fuck up vector. A whole new level of discrimination (see GATTACA). You know why the future is the future? Because it's full of unknowns. How many FDA approved medications turned out it actually killed you? It was the best they could do at the time remember?
I see a man of culture. You like your catgirls like you like your wine, do you?
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.
fired from the university
hired by the army.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.