I’m just here for the comments

Unit 731 is the truly horrible source of a lot of modern medical knowledge

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

Just so you all know what his horrible crime was...

"Formally presenting the story at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) three days later, he said that the twins were born from genetically modified embryos that were made resistant to M-tropic strains of HIV.[48] His team recruited 8 couples consisting each of HIV-positive father and HIV-negative mother through Beijing-based HIV volunteer group called Baihualin China League. During in vitro fertilization, the sperms were cleansed of HIV. Using CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing, they introduced a natural mutation CCR5-Δ32 in gene called CCR5, which would confer resistance to M-tropic HIV infection."

So imagine a couple where one has HIV but they really want to have a baby. He basically made it so their children were hiv free and then immunized them (edited for accuracy). In all my Crispr research, this is the story that most caused me to feel the science system had wronged a good person. Literally Lulu and Nana can grow up healthy now. Science community smashed him, but to the real people he helped he is basically a saint. I love now seeing him again and seeing he still has his ideals. Again, fuck all those science boards and councils that attacked him. Think of the actual real couple that just wants a kid without their liferuining disease. Also I love how he isnt some rightwing nutjob nor greedy capitalist. See his statement about this tech should be free for all people and he will never privately help billionaires etc etc.

anyway, ideals. i recognized them when i first came across him; i recognize them now. I know enough about him that I will savagely defend this guy. He isn't making plagues or whatever. He is helping real people.

I think gene theraly is a miracle technology that should absolutely be explored more. The thing is, we're already at a point where we can do it in adults. So doing it on embyros, which can't consent, is simply an uncessasary moral hazard.

That said, I think the doctor here sort of has a point, which is that medical research is sometimes so concerned with doing no harm that it allows harm to happen without trying to treat it.

I think a really exceeding important clarification here is he edited the genomes of human embryos, not babies. Babies are already born humans, embryos are a clump of cells that will become a baby in the future. I do not condone gene editing without consent, which is what he did, and yes there is lots of questionable ethics around gene editing but he did NOT experiment on babies. This should be made clear especially in a science based community, memes or not.

Implying that babies are the same thing as embryos is fundamentally incorrect, in the same way a caterpillar is not a butterfly and a larva is not a fly, the distinction is very important.

EDIT To add further detail - One of the reasons this is so unethical is that he experimented on human embryos that were later born and became babies. His intent was always to create a gene edited human, but the modifications were done while they were embryos, not live babies.