this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 month ago (8 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] 37 points 1 month ago (3 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] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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] -3 points 1 month 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 1 month 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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month 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] 6 points 1 month ago

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

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

Why did you self censor by saying "dot"?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month 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] 20 points 1 month 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] 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)

He used CRISPR to make babies immune to HIV.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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] 5 points 1 month ago
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month 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] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago

What do you mean? What did I get wrong?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?

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

A lot of contexts? Like the development depending on formula vs mother's milk? Experimenting doesn't need to mean vivisection or injecting unregulated drugs, but if you need to do the experiments illegally, I'm not sure it was something "safe"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Not babies, embyros

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Supposed to mean “machine-learning”

No, it officially stands for Mali. Why do you think it stands for machine leaning?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Great question! The truth is that the CCP and Russian Federation are basically spiritual successors of Marx himself. Here's a list of bullet points explaining...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Thats why China made a Marxism anime

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month 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] 3 points 1 month 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] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Always funny how the right winger .wolders love to say shit about us, but are too scared to face the reality since they just defederated from us.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

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