this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.