...are we sure he's not doing any more human germ line gene editing without ethical approval or patient consent?
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Meow >:)
based
The disease is lack of kawaii, and the cure is catgirls.
Instance checks out haha
Very true ararararararagi
Wrong emoji. Should've used >:3
that's not an emoji
emoticon
Potato potato
Why is it called the Unicode Emoticons Block when it only includes emojis? Checkmate atheist!
All emoji are emoticons, not all emoticons are emoji?
In furtherance of peace, I suggest the term 3mojicon. Also in furtherance of rage.
>:3mojicon
that's how you know he didn't succeed yet
What is with the spamming? Is he cloning post?
Its just 4 posts. Relax. The guy in the pictures is a legendary psycho criminal that is the subject of lots of memery.
4 posts is like a quarter of all lemmy posts in a day
Lmao, who's this guy?
He was found guilty of medical malpractice after gene editing babies by treating their embryos with CRISPR/Cas9. He claims that he was trying to make them resistant to HIV, and that medical ethics are preventing cures from being discovered, but his critics say that we know CRISPR is too unreliable to use on a genome the size of a human's, and is more likely to introduce dangerous mutations than apply the intended change, hence why no one else has done this before.
So why is he allowed to work in this field again? Seems wild
His assistants weren't though
Ok, but, does it really not work, or like, it's just that you would have to run it in a batch and kill the bad cells, which could be unethical on human embryos?
Like, could we grow legs on a lungfish (which Google says has a larger genome than humans) using CRISPR-cas9 if we did not care about botched embryos?
You'd need to test every cell in the embryo to be sure none of them had off-target mutations, and DNA sequencing doesn't leave the cell alive, so you can't prove it worked without killing the embryo. He tested some of the cells and discarded embryos where those cells were damaged, but there's no way to know if the untested cells in the embryos were fine, and given what we know about the reliability, it's more likely that there are problems than not.
Making them resistant to HIV. How does he test it whether they actually are...?
My understanding is that they were embryos from HIV infected parents, so they had very little chance of avoiding infection during birth. His argument is that their chances of survival were already so low, there's little harm that could be done if the treatment wasn't effective.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the circumstances. It puts stuff in a different perspective.
I feel the need to point out that almost no babies get HIV from their mother as long as the mother is being successfully treated with anti retroviral medication.
The linked Wikipedia article says only their fathers were HIV-positive, and typically that wouldn't lead to a parent infecting their child unless they decided to share needles etc.
Sequence them; he was bashing in a gene that we already know conveys HIV resistance (but not complete immunity), the ∆32 mutation. If sequencing shows that the babies have the mutation, and also don't have any other negative mutations as a result of the experiment, then it was successful.
That 'and also' is the hard one to be sure about.
"I need a human baby" is a very difficult sentence to start a conversation with. I don't blame him for avoiding that awkward proposal.
Better to ask forgiveness than permission!
The ethics board does not approve the message.
A scientist who has served time in prison for editing human genetics. It was with the intention of combatting HIV, but it seems to have been done with little to no regard for medical ethics, including misleading the parents of the babies involved and apparently putting them on the hook for the costs of the experiments if they pulled out
Legendary mad scientist. Does stuff that's obviously unethical but not illegal (yet), gets caught, the authorities patch the law, and then he moves on to new mad science. Once went to jail for editing a baby's genome.
What if cat girls are the cure to all disease you ever think about that huh Jiankui He