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

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.

I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling

I understand what you're saying, but his experiment allowed the embryos to come to term and be born as human babies. Scientists have worked with human embryos before and avoided similar outcry by not allowing them to develop further (scientific outcry, not religious). Calling his work an experiment on human embryos ignores the fact that he always intended for his work to impact the real lives of real humans who would be born.

Seems like splitting hairs, at best, for you to claim the three edited human babies who were born from this experiment aren't part of the experiment. He fully aimed to study them and they are still being scientifically monitored.

He also had a bizarre contract he made the parents sign that if they changed their minds they had to reimburse him the financial costs of the experiment.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error.

To be fair, testicles aren't designed for that task.

A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/553598c1e4b0a7f854584291/t/55ee4a5ee4b025d99f73150e/1441679966732/Penis+Size+Study+-+Veale+et+al+2015+BJUI.pdf

It is acknowledged that some of the volunteers across different studies may have taken part in a study because they were more confident with their penis size than the general male population.

Ha, poisoned data tho

a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis

Is this some puritan rule? Plenty don't care to flap their erect penis in the faces of some researchers if they asked nicely. What got ethics to do with it when there is consent?

It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it's stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who's been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren't much use.

Eh, usually less than you would expect. We're really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it's been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.

We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn't get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.

It's how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we're intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don't and look at them.

That's actually pretty the whole premise of The Vital Abyss short story. Cortazar explains how he signed up with Protogen and how glad he was to get the nerve staple that removed all empathy from him. Ot, and all the other short stories are worth reading if you liked The Expanse