this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 1 month ago (16 children)

Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That's their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

No he used crispr to give babies HIV resistance.

People on the side of classical ethics say the outcome was unknown so manipulating the embryo was wrong (ie maybe it makes them more likely to have a birth defect or something else wrong with them). Others might say "an embryo isn't a person" or "the risk was low and the gain was high" but unfortunately he also didn't tell anyone so.

There's also the fake "ethics" where people claim humans have more inherent value than chimps or mice, which of course we do not. Unfortunately this false platform is where a lot of the arguments are based: humans special, so we can't manipulate their genome before birth. Once they are born of course these kids would get HIV and die, or be sent to work in a suicide (apple) factory, or help murder Uyghurs...but god forbid you experiment on people that's bad.

I'm on the side of he shouldn't have done things the way he did, but there are hiv-resistant babies and we know how to make them now and it's easy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He did things in a completely non reproducible way, which is not science or research. If any of the victims have better outcomes that is pure chance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Where is there a document that describes that part?

It looks like the mutation wasn't perfect but I don't see anything that indicates it wouldn't be reproducible.

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