These test tube babies are just a prototype. The shocker is that they tried to do it but not actually did it
Yao was part of a genetic breeding program. His parents were brought together for the purpose of trying to produce a superior baby.
Uhh no. It has nothing to do with the USA not doing it. The USA could have done it years ago but didn’t for ethical reasons. The Chinese government has a history of unethical behavior and concern/skepticism is warranted.
That's what happens when you base your culture around progress and not religious tribalism. I guess I can take pride that we aren't so low that we torture animals while we eat them, fuel the killing of endangered species or kill domesticated dogs for food and clothing. **** that. The Chinese can keep that.
Certainly those quotes raise concerns but they are from a critic. It depends on the risks involved and the results. If you could be 100% immune from HIV while increasing your risk to the flu by 1%, that's a no-brainer decision. And let's be real, the real controversy is because it involves editing human DNA, not because of the risks involved. Like I said, if their results can be validated (i.e. they created an immunity to HIV/AIDS with no significant downsides), that should be a great scientific accomplishment. Personally, I am skeptical of their claim because I don't think we're that far along in CRISPR research yet but I'm hoping I'm wrong.
Humans are a near perfect creation of science. When you artifically alter genes, mutations occur to counter those alterations. The altered genes won't get HIV, but they'll get a new disease that humanity has no cure for, and that could spread and wipe out half of China. Nothing useful comes from this considering over industrialization has made the quality of life for the majority terrible as is. It's stupid and a waste of money to pretend like humans can artificially create a better lives for themselves than the natural or live for 200 years.
The Chinese can also keep their record for 45,000,000 killed in less than 4 years and appointing a dictator for life... and the recent support of death camps.
The US also could have gotten past the controversy about abortion being legal decades ago but yeah....we're just too ethical to move forward and stop living in the past. This is has little to do with ethics and everything to do with religion vs. science.
Curing serious genetic diseases/defects is not a waste of money and a legitimate benefit from CRISPR research and something that our country should not fear.
Exactly, genetic engineering would be great for someone with a genetic disorder and future gens. It's coming/here in some FDA trials, I'm just hoping this doesn't cause a setback overall if this mutation they've added/changed creates other issues than just being more susceptible to other virus types and not AIDS etc..
The point is not the end game, but how you get there. The ethics includes how you get there, not just what you do with it once proven and perfected. I’m not so sure I want to be part of sacrificing babies for the greater good like communist thinking in China would justify. This experiment provides zero benefit to the baby while exposing it to unknown risks stemming from the fact those genes they mucked up provide protection to other viruses, that can kill much quicker, whereas HIV has many sound treatment alternatives.
There is a lot of evidence that CRISPR causes all sorts of unintended genetic changes. The scientist in question has been suspended without pay and is under investigation by the local medical ethics board. I'm theoretically very much in favor of gene editing when the risks are well defined and properly weighed, but that isn't the case here. The risks measure somewhere between "unknown" and "high". This is like giving pregnant women thalidomide without properly testing effects in pregnancy and hoping everything works out. These children will live and die and maybe suffer for a full lifetime on this guy's roll of the dice that the unknowns will turn out to be no big deal. He reaps the "glory" if it works out, the children assume all of the risk.
Yes, I think this would be better for people who already were exposed to the virus, not newborns. I mean if this was what they wanted to test etc. And current treatments were not working for the patient.
Right, this was handled/approved poorly. The risk/benefit was not in the babies favor. I do wonder if the families were compensated, I mean how was this sold to them?
Are you suggesting gene-editing on a full grown adult, vs an embryo? Does that even work? I mean, how does it spread?
Yes, you can gene edit on a full grown adult. If you look at FDA trials they're typically using a retrovirus vector for the delivery (so, just like HIV* but instead of it having the virus it contains the corrected code they want to add/edit). *HIV on its own is a retrovirus. The virus attaches to the site like HIV would but inserts the corrected code. This is making it a bit simpler explanation but there's plenty of articles on pubmed/online.
I think that's one of CRISPR's potential uses, curing diseases in adults as well as embryos. You could argue that's also what RNAi is trying to do as well, but a lesser extent because RNAi doesn't actually alter your genome. It's a tailored system that does use viruses, so I would assume it can spread, but the likelihood of it seems low to me. You still need a target DNA sequence, and that can be fairly finely tuned. Again, this isn't like something we as scientists cooked up. We stole it from nature and have hijacked the machinery to do what we want.
