this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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that is also where i place the importance: on the kids and parents. Not the science community nor science councils. Probably why i dont work at a university lab
I’m just here for the comments
Hot take.: He is right though.
I am sure you have examples of situations where lower ethical standards led to much faster progress in research.
Unfortunately, research on prisoners and concentration camp victims did produce new valuable medical information.
Most of the field of gynecology is based on experiments done on women slaves, where the "doctors" decided their victims conveniently didn't have nerve endings.
Ethics throttles research.
But I am aghast at the thought that we should permit unethical research in the pursuit of, at the end of the day, greed.
And I say this as a professional scientist.
I can't believe this conversation is even necessary.
This is obvious though
currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.
...but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn't care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you "believe" in it, which is the beautiful thing about science
so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)
Now, taking a step back, maybe you're right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that's getting into a whole "sociology of science" discussion.
Many kinds of early-in-life medical interventions can have permanent negative effects if they go bad, but nonetheless our ethical standards don't preclude them. This is a field where the ethical standards are suffocatingly high without good reason. As an aside, we should consider euthanizing newborns who suffer debilitatingly severe negative side effects due to any kind of failed medical intervention (with parental consent, of course). This will directly improve quality-of-life standards and also allow us to lower ethical standards on experimental treatments too.
Unit 731 is the truly horrible source of a lot of modern medical knowledge
Can you explain what Unit 731 has to do with Dr. He?
I doubt it has anything to do with him. My comment was in reference to the context of the post, whereby medical experimentation on humans is being regarded as progress and being held back by ethics.
This could be a good meme template.
To all the commenters saying this guy was a saint for doing what he did, would you say the same thing had the outcome been disastrous? Babies born without HIV, but with constant excruciating pain or mental deficiency?
He took an extraordinarily reckless and permanently life-altering, for good or bad, risk with children's lives.
edit: spelling
The good old adage: "you don’t have a gambling addiction as long as you keep winning"
A lot of geneticist are DEEPLY against trying these things. This guy's lucky so far in that his actions haven't caused serious problems, we really don't know how adjusting genetics can backfire, but according to the professionals the risks are very very high.
it aint luck. he did it right
This is very hypothetical. You could make the same argument about any experimental medical intervention in a child's life. If I had the choice of being born with HIV or an experimental procedure with some (how much?) chance of risk, I'd chose the procedure. I think the criticism of this form of treatment is highly coloured because it sounds like "playing god."
You could make the same argument about any experimental medical intervention in a child’s life
Yup, and there's even ethics review boards convened solely to analyze that argument with the particulars of a case and rule whether the treatment is okay to go ahead. This guy played god without approval from this review process and deserved the time served.
would he, as the God curing the hiv, be more or less moral than the God giving the hiv?
The power to enact change is not a 100% bad thing. It only looks that way because of rampant corruption. There are good people in the world too. It is the good people who should be powerful. Keep in mind he is not developing something for a monsanto patent thicket; he is curing diseases without it being tied to nor profiting big pharma
Okay, I do relate to this argument. It's the ethics review board's decision and not his to make. Fair enough. In this case, I am disappointed by the ethic review board's decision, which is why I sympathize with the doctor.
He also did actual time for it and everyone involved was banned from practicing medicine in China, even despite the fact they are the core of CRISPR technology at the moment, they still care enough about ethics to not support this.
Seems like a case of one rogue team of people deciding what they where doing was for the moral good and then the state checking them.
We can still see the initial intentions as being morally good, and the outcome of it being gray but punished; its a balanced perspective; a lot of people here seem to have the impression it was approved by the CPC when it wasnt.
We can still see the initial intentions as being morally good
Ah, yes... the pavement of the road to Hell.
This is a universal criticism of doing anything which is intended to be morally good.
Good thing the CPC put a roadblock on that path and diverted us back into the morally grey middle road then.
This is the moral dilemma.
The whole Grimdank universe of just randomly testing things on people to make humans genetically more superior will absolutely improve life for future humans. No question. On paper anyways.
Sure lets just torture all the poor people so a handfull of rich fucks can afford stem-cell-zinfandel, never mind that 100,000 people were tortured and killed, at least we discovered a new anti-wrinkle cream. If you don't think that's what it always is in practice you're delusional. Shit like that is just as likely to cause mass disease or our extinction than it is to discover something useful, perhaps even more so
Who are you even responding to?
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