this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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

I'd like to get in to genetic engineering. When I came across his story while researching crispr, I sympathized with him. He did the experiment in what to me is a moral way. Just going on memory it was like 'take 4 embryos, edit two, keep parents in the loop and ask which embryo they want'. Complain all you want, but he did no wrong; it's the public and system that then wronged him. So yeah, of nearly anyone, he is the one who most gets to say 'ethics ruining science'. It's ironic because there are tons and tons of unethical science activities done literally every day. But for those to be ignored and instead ethics police to hit him when he did all his stuff morally and resulted probably in two extrahealthy kids... Yeah I agree with him. I think everything should be done morally, but if he is going to be hit like that under the guise of 'ethics' then nah. 'ethics' needs to be replaced by morals and decency. Literally horrifically murdering people (war) is legal and accepted while him using science, AND CORRECTLY, to protect people from liferuining diseases got the treatment it did? nah. I hope he continues growing and doing more genetic engineering and this time doesn't share a single thing with the public. He should never give the people that treated him like that a single piece of data. There are ways to bypass the patent thickets if he isn't selling what he does, especially if he shares no info about it. I support him.

prepares for 200 downvotes

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 2 days ago (22 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] 0 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago (13 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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (9 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 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] 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (8 children)

He used CRISPR to make babies immune to HIV.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

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[–] [email protected] 172 points 2 days ago (10 children)

If a person's criticism is of "ethics" in general, that individual should not be allowed in a position of authority or trust. If you have a specific constraint for which you can make a case that it goes too far and hinders responsible science and growth (and would have repeatable, reliable results), then state the specific point clearly and the arguments in your favor.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 2 days ago (7 children)

So if we put these extra pair of legs on babies then they can stand in more extreme angles making them better at construction at a time when there is a housing shortage

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (5 children)

"Speed limits are holding me back from getting from a to B in as little time as possible" yeah, and they reduce the likelihood of injuring/killing a people in the process.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Mengele vibes right there.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Well, the nazis did make a lot of scientific progress…

/s, just in case

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (4 children)

wait he's not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher

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

Hot take.: He is right though.

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (7 children)

Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before, specially on war times. And each time humanity concluded that some knowledge has too high a price and we're better off not finding out some things.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, especially with a heavy blood cost, isn't the way to progress as a species.

And I should know, as a person greatly defined by curiosity about everything and more limited emotional capacity than other people due to mental limitations.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

If you're talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.

They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn't, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.

It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Watch Star Trek

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