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Scientist who gene-edited babies is back in lab and ‘proud’ of past work despite jailing
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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He got lucky. If he'd given them a thalamide-like condition, would you still be saying the same?
When it comes to human experiments, you can't go solo and hope you get lucky. You need rigorous reviews, standards, ethics committees.
You especially can't trust the results of an individual who has already shown a clear lack of regard for basic rules and regulations in favor of his personal God complex.
Yea. He got lucky. Lucky he spent years studying to become a doctor and then further years studying gene editing and the roots of genetic diseases. All luck. No skill or hard work at all. Just a lucky break.
There are proper procedures for these sorts of experiments that were not followed.
No amount of domain knowledge offsets malpractice, which is factually what occurred here, regardless of outcome.
Just because I have significant experience in systems engineering and administration, and we have no testing environment that would work as an accurate "clone" of reality, doesn't mean that I just get to ignore proper procedure and make changes to my work environment as I wish.
Even when I have the knowledge to know the risks, potential problems, can map out the potential outcomes, etc. I still have to follow proper procedure. Sometimes that means creating test scenarios to approximate reality, sometimes that means that I simply cannot move forward until a suitable testing environment exists.
Either way, as a knowledgable professional, there are proper processes that must be followed.
These are much more dire in the realm of medicine than computers.
Personally, my metric for "success" on this is when they die of old age with no complications that could possibly be related to the genetic manipulation. Is your metric so low that the fact they have no reported complications this early in life means success?
If he had not been successful would you be as defensive of him? The children are still children, with a lifetime of potential complications left that may or may not occur.
Medical ethics is way more involved than "one guy has good credentials, so let him at it."
Human experimentation is a fraught topic, one with a literal genocidal history. You don't let "the guy who is really good at this do whatever he wants" to people, because that's what all the murderers did too.
That's a strawman fallacy, I did not say that. I did not make that argument.
He got lucky in doing something which is prohibited for a very good reason.
I can train for years to be a good air traffic controller. If I one day decide to have a plane take off from a runway while another is landing on it in the same direction and nobody notices or dies, I am still lucky despite all my training. Rules, especially safety rules, exist for a very good reason. They are written in blood.
Arrogant people defy such rules because they believe themselves to be better and other people suffer for it. The fact that this one person may have been lucky and succeeded makes no difference to the fact it should never have happened. It's like looking at lottery winners as if they're smart people for having sun the lottery and ignoring all the similar people who haven't won but lost.
If I'm a trained electrician and I have no fuses on me, so I just stick in a piece of metal, it may work. People might live in that home to great satisfaction until it is torn down, none the wiser. But it's not right. Because I'm taking unnecessary risks with their lives. One small oversight, failing appliance, or accident-prone cat and people will die in that house fire.