“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Isaac Asimov
Or at least, what it thinks is knowledge. Medical history is littered with practices that maimed patients for no gain. We have frequently believed the wrong thing and to think that we no longer do is insanity. I frequently think about what procedures we do currently that will one day be considered evil (balloon angioplasty, maybe). There’s a lot of dogma and perverse incentives in science. But maybe that just speaks to the wisdom part.
And I hope I don’t come off as anti-science. I believe the scientific method is our best chance at understanding the world we’re in.
This is terrifying. Obviously he’s a smart guy, but he’s incapable of seeing how unethical and risky this is.
Just because they were born and seem normal and healthy now that doesn’t mean the gene therapy was successful. The kids may be lucky or just not showing symptoms of anything they are tracking.
He basically jumped out into traffic, didn’t get hit by a car and said that made it okay.
I saw this before and I do wonder if by the time I’m an old bastard if this is the guy who proved that it can be done safely or just another monster who thought ethics didnt apply to him.
Well its always been a matter of time before we start genetically modifying humans I guess he’s just ahead of the times. But yeah incredibly risky if ya gonna genetically modify a human do it to yourself.
if ya gonna genetically modify a human do it to yourself.
I’m sure it’s a lot easier to modify a handful of cells and let them replicate than it is to modify millions of cells…
It was a terrible thing to do, but I get it.
He said the three genome-edited children were “perfectly healthy and have no problems with their growth”, according to the newspaper, adding that the twins, now aged 5, were attending kindergarten.
This motherfucker is playing William Tell with baby genes and claiming it’s safe because he didn’t put an arrow into somebody’s forehead. He won’t even know if he hit the apple unless he exposes the children to HIV.
Yeah but the babies also wouldn’t have been born without him, had an HIV positive parent and he did a ton for crispr research. He was only disgraced ‘disappeared’ and jailed because PR was bad. He really didn’t do anything too awful (I think he was too manipulative of the parents) but most of the media you see paints him like doctor fucking Mengele.
The more terrifying aspect is he might have hit the wrong targets.
And we might not know for generations.
