this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 102 points 6 days ago (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago

Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their "cHiNa BaD" circlejerk.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Oh shit someone tell the ~~fascist scum~~ liberal toads that its actually blue on blue, this guy was working for a honky kong universty!!!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

What he did was illegal. Even without specific laws about genetic modification or cloning, he did perform experiments with babies without the necessity approvals from ethics and safety, without informed consent from the parents and likely misusing funds allocated to other research.

3 years is still to short.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

he couldn’t be punished for something that wasn’t illegal when he did it?

I don't think CCP cares about the principle of no ex post facto punishments.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (7 children)
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

Hong kongs a dictatorship? You know, the place this doctor was working?

Well observed, its been an apartheid state since its inception as a colony to the UK.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago

It's literal misinformation, so it probably should be removed, yes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Everyone who opposes dictatorships is a Nazi or a liberal, who are also Nazis.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Nazis, by definition, do not oppose dictatorships. Not sure where you got that idea, but it certainly wasn't a level-headed assessment of history.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The guy you're responding to is a liberal doing a piss poor parody of a ML.

You can't do a good parody if you get angry before the punchline, or don't understand the thing you're parodying in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I assume you guys get that a lot?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yup. It's actually crazy how anticommunist propaganda creates so many people who are so confidently wrong about things that are so easy to investigate.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Lol it's so anti-communist to be anti-tankie. /s

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago

I read it in Das Kapital, by Joseph Stalin. Don't you liberal anarkiddies read theory?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Why did you self censor by saying "dot"?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

I wrote that on my phone's touch keyboard, and I didn't want to use \. to escape the dot character to avoid autohotlinking.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Yes, .ml users do indeed tend to be more concerned with fact-checking and saying things that are actually true as compared to flat.world, thank you for pointing that out.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Asking out of curiosity what does that "ml" mean?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Supposed to mean ~~"machine-learning"~~ Mali, but the developers of Lemmy (whose instance it is) are using it to mean "Marxism-Leninism", which is a misnomer invented by Stalin. While ml has some non-tankie leftists, that instance is infamous because of them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

It's actually the TLD for Mali, not explicitly related to machine learning, or leftism. That's mainly what it's used for though, outside of Mali.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Marxism leninism, it's a political ideology, subset of communism. Basically the communists that love USSR, China, Cuba, etc. They love running propaganda about how these authoritarian governments did nothing wrong and how all criticism of them is just negative propaganda by the West.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Thank you kind stranger. Now I get the .ml hate

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The devil is in the details....

You are likely thinking (as I am) that he implanted robotic arms on babies but he may have just rubbed sage oil on them for all we know

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

He used CRISPR to make babies immune to HIV.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

No, he inserted a gene that is associated with resistance to HIV, but is also associated with increased risk of some cancers. He did this without informed consent, he did this without running it by an ethics board, he did this without knowing whether it would work or not.

Let’s stop pretending that he’s a good guy that just magically made HIV immune babies.

Edit: it also didn’t work. The babies have genes both with and without the mutation.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

We also don't know if it was just that gene that was altered, or if there are other effects. Modern gene editing isn't so precise that we can edit just the gene we want. A lot of genes with similar sequences as the target can also be affected.

It's basically like firing a shotgun at the house they live in. You might hit the one you want, but you may also hit other unrelated genes in the process.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Thanks for the info

definitely on the evil side considering he probably planed to infect them to test his theories

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago

Nope, he had no plans to infect them. The babies had parents who were HIV-positive.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Wow you are jumping to a lot of stupid ass conclusions for someone who won't google a name.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Did not have baby zombie apocalypse on my Bingo card, but there ya go

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

What do you mean? What did I get wrong?

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