this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Wasn't he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?

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[–] nicknonya@lemmy.blahaj.zone 37 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 21 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Nah, I'm pretty sure that's the dude that used crispr on some babies years ago in an attempt to make them immune to HIV or something.

[–] warbond@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I was very surprised to hear that China arrested him for it in the first place

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[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 163 points 1 day ago (3 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.

[–] neatobuilds@lemmy.today 67 points 22 hours ago (2 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

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 16 points 17 hours ago

For acceptance in the US we will also add more hands so the baby can hold an AR 15 while doing construction work.

[–] Comment105@lemm.ee 24 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

I am convinced, I vote to allow it.

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[–] militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 8 points 16 hours ago

Best I can do is generalization

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 29 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

And we already have a safety valve for when conventional ethics is standing in the way of vital research: the researchers test on themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine

If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

It's not terribly common because most useful research is perfectly ethical, but we have a good number of cases of researchers deciding that there's no way for someone to ethically volunteer for what they need to do, so they do it to themselves. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they make very valuable discoveries. Sometimes both.

So the next time someone wantz to strap someone to a rocket engine and fire it into a wall, all they have to do is go first and be part of the testing pool.

[–] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

You can't really do the kind of experiments being done genetically modifying growing infants on yourself, I imagine. Not that that should be an excuse, of course.

[–] Nursery2787@lemmy.ml 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

You can work your way through all the different animal models, showing that you have a clear understanding of every single bio mechanism. Then start off with a small change to a human baby THAT WOULD OBVIOUSLY BENEFIT showing that nothing bad happens. Like we figured out this specific sequence leads to deformed hands, we have plenty of control babies with the deformed hands.

By this guys own logic, he didn’t even get usable fucking data. Crispr changes DNA, yeah no shit we all knew that. He gave them a slight boost to HIV. How the fuck are we supposed to find out without exposing them. A high likelihood that they would have grown up never worrying about HIV in the first place.

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[–] hikuro93@lemmy.ca 72 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 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.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 17 hours 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.

[–] militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.

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[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 6 points 15 hours ago

Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.

[–] angrystego@lemmy.world 16 points 20 hours ago

Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.

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