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Medicine Biotech China

Chinese Scientists Claim To Have Genetically Modified Human Embryos 182

Posted by samzenpus from the super-babies dept.
Annanag writes: There were rumours — but now it's been confirmed. Chinese scientists have attempted the ethically questionable feat of genetically modifying human embryos. The scientists try to head off ethical concerns by using 'non-viable' embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, obtained from local fertility clinics. The study is a landmark — but also a cautionary tale.
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Chinese Scientists Claim To Have Genetically Modified Human Embryos More

Chinese Scientists Claim To Have Genetically Modified Human Embryos

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  • Cautionary Tale? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:53PM (#49532355)
    Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?

    • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:58PM (#49532407)

      We haven't even established the "ethically questionable" part. Sounds like more neo-ludditism by people who are afraid of science or progress. We should all be born crippled by billions of years of evolutionary baggage as God intended, I guess.

      • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:10PM (#49532511)

        This stuff is all good as long as its well documented which genes were changed and why. Because copyright (or patents) (or even (worst of all) trade secrets) on human DNA is the worst thing that can happen to our human society. We don't want only the well born to have better genes. But of course this won't happen. There will be a strong gene copyright lobby, and it will demand DNA to be copyrightable, to make research pay off.

        Also, we should think of the possible pressure future parents may be in, in giving their children the best genes. Perhaps one day (rather sooner than later) we can change genes of living humans, too, e.g. with viruses, and then at least you can revide your parent's choices about your body.

        • It practically pays for itself if it can eliminate many of the hereditary diseases that plague many people today.

          • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by zlives ( 2009072 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:33PM (#49532691)

            we can't get people to immunize their kids.... good luck!!

            • we can't get people to immunize their kids.... good luck!!

              I don't think most of us really care about people stupid enough to remove their progeny from the gene pool so that they don't pass on the "stupid gene" to future generations. Maybe you care about these people, but I pretty much think that the fact they have medical power of attorney for their children until the age of majority is a great negative feedback mechanism.

            • Luckily this is in China where they are forward thinking.

              • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

                by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 )

                We can only hope to bring Christianity to China to slow them down somewhat before we are a thousand years behind them, again

        • Andromeda was the cautionary tale (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Yes we can make our own sub-species of Nietzschean. Man won't that be great!

          • There's a better example in history.

            Whenever a race or people feel themselves superior, they take action to try to ensure that becomes a reality. You cant engineer out the human ego.

        • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Jack9 ( 11421 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:15PM (#49533855)

          The takeaway is that sooner or later, there is going to be widespread genetic modification. Many of us have known this for a very long time, some suspected, some hoped it will not happen. It will, just like we will have autonomous robots doing all manner of things, one day (all vehicles, maybe in my lifetime).

          > This stuff is all good as long as its well documented which genes were changed and why

          The impetus is not to hope a pharma company will disclose information, but to start baking in the expectation in all strata of society as a normal process. Politics, capitalist endeavors, technology, and copyright is BAD for our future society. To put it simply, a struggle against the secret vs the open is BAD for society. Tuskeegee, concentration camps, and other horrifics were only possible because it's still accepted that 'state secrets' or even "personal liberty" is tied to exposed information, as if there is an invisible-acceptable moral line. You have to get people willing to listen and accept the opposite of what the US (and to an extent) European citizens' expectation of privacy allow. Would I like my home address available for anyone? Of course not. Mostly because there aren't enough protections/retributions and society EXPECTS you to be punished for having that information exposed. What we want has to change. That level of openness is something humanity needs to build toward, if we want to secure against potential abuses. Props to eu for making strides. The method of sticking our head in the sand, only to look up when there's a rumbling, will never be effective and will continue to be abused by those who understand it (we'll just spin the story).

          I don't know how to get there, but we will or we will die from someone making a big enough mistake with genetics. I'll probably be long dead, but it bothers me to have such certainty about these issues and so frustrated when there's a suggestion that more forced oversight will satisfy.

      • They warn that "because the genetic changes to embryos, known as germline modification, are heritable, they could have an unpredictable effect on future generations."

        I guess they mean if the children don't inherit the disease, DrugCo's profits will fall.

        • They warn that "because the genetic changes to embryos, known as germline modification, are heritable, they could have an unpredictable effect on future generations."

          I guess they mean if the children don't inherit the disease, DrugCo's profits will fall.

          Unless DrugCo's patent skills are Monsanto-like...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by oreaq ( 817314 )
          Silly. You don't get to buy the genetic upgrades; but you can license them. If you fail to pay your monthly subscription fee the enhancements will get turned off.
          • Once the germ line is altered, they can't just "turn it off." It's not like when you don't pay your exorcist and get re-possessed.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by oreaq ( 817314 )
              The phenotype is just some physical or chemical reaction. Of course it can be turned of. It's not magic.
      • Completely agree. I see a lot of problems selective genetics solves in the long term. I don't think we're close to a Gatacca-like future at this point, but even if we are, and I say this as a lefty, who cares? We've solved a lot of problems and probably saved a ton in long-term health care, and increased the average IQ of the population while we were at it.

      • Not quite (Score:3, Interesting)

        by s.petry ( 762400 )

        While I'm sure you can find some zealots who believe this way, the majority of people have a different perspective. There is a reason we wish to have the ethical discussions and rules laid out (which technically exist, but China ignored them). Here is a short (not complete) list of ethical concerns. The numbers don't indicate a priority, just separating them clearly.

        1. If you can manipulate genes to make someone unhealthy "healthy", you also have the ability to go the opposite direction. How can we en

      • "I don't know what this is for" is not the same as "evolutionary baggage". You shouldn't confuse the two.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Meshach ( 578918 )

      Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?

      I think that the submitter used the wrong phrase. They probably mean "Starting down a slippery slope."

    • Indeed why should it be ethically questionable to experiment on embryos but not on chimps, dolphins, pigs, and other species that can show clear signs of pain? If there's something morally wrong about this, then we might as well give human/animal rights to all species that can cry, squeal, or kick you in the face when poked.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        One is becoming human and the other is not?

        Well, maybe not in the case of non-viable embryos, though I have to wonder if they were inherently unviable or if someone made them that way.

    • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @08:57PM (#49533209)

      Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?

      They were "horribly" able to cure B-thalassemia in 51.8% of the embryos.

      We should "learn not to do this type of thing" from the post-testing not having a 100% success rate.

      You know, instead of just not implanting the other 48.2% of embryos that were not successfully modified to not have the disease.

      Not that they planned on implanting them anyway.

      PS: I know in vitro clinic which would be screaming the "Happy, happy, Joy, joy!" song at the top of their lungs for a 51.8% pre-screening success rate on just not implanting embryos that carried the gene for Huntington's or Downs Syndrome, let alone *fixing* the damn thing.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They were "horribly" able to cure B-thalassemia in 51.8% of the embryos.

        Oh, if only they could manage to spice in reading comprehension. Here, I'll simplify it for you:

        "Of the 28 successfully spliced, only a fraction contained the replacement genetic material," and, "Huang notes that his team likely only detected a subset of the unintended mutations because their study looked only at a portion of the genome, known as the exome."

      • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:4, Informative)

        by binarstu ( 720435 ) on Thursday April 23, 2015 @04:46AM (#49534831)
        Just to clarify, there is no "gene for ... Downs Syndrome". Down syndrome is caused [ndss.org] by a partial or complete extra (i.e., third) copy of chromosome 21. Thus, it is caused by a failure of meiosis during gamete development, not by a particular allele of any one gene or group of genes.
    • From the article, "The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications." I assume that is what they meant by "cautionary tale" in the next sentence.

    • "Why is this a cautionary tale?"

      Because GMO means evil, and GMO with humans is so evil that it might as well be Republican.

      The objective described in the paper is well clear of ethics problems, because it's correction of a genetic abnormality, thalassemia.The first step, of course, is to learn to do this reliably. Then we'll be getting into enhancements. Tetrachromat vision? Enhanced memory? An immune system that can nuke anything?

      when we get to the point of making changes in the human germline that are not

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by quenda ( 644621 )

        Because GMO means evil, and GMO with humans is so evil that it might as well be Republican.

        You might as well say "because meddling with God's Work is so evil it might as well be Democratic".
        Why the petty party politics? Those of us outside the US can barely tell the difference between the two parties anyway.

        Not all Republics and Democrats are noisy extremists. Many can see shades of grey.

        • I'm referring to the automatic assumption anti-science people make that any pro-science position is a shill for "big $INDUSTRY." Any use of GMO is automatically a plot by Monsanto, even open-source charity projects like golden rice.

          Now that the anti-science movement is pressing on to oppose science itself rather than just its applications, the argument is getting even sillier. We're being asked to believe, for the most recent example, that "Big Astronomy" is strip-mining Hawaii. I suppose that explains why

    • Re:Cautionary Tale? (Score:4, Informative)

      by cyn1c77 ( 928549 ) on Thursday April 23, 2015 @12:35AM (#49534141)

      Why is this a cautionary tale? What horrific outcome did they have that we are supposed to learn from?

      Well, if you read the article (I know, I know... reading them is overrated), you would have read that they were trying to modify a gene that can mutate to cause a disease. Of the 71 of 86 embryos that survived their tinkering, 54 were tested to reveal that only 28 were successfully spliced and only a fraction of those contained the replacement genetic material. As a bonus failure, they induced a number of mutations elsewhere in the genes.

      They concluded that it was a colossal failure that would result in a seriously messed up offspring and that technology is not ready for that application yet. (No consideration of if just THEIR technique was poor.) With the appropriate spin (do not try this at home), they were able to get their results published in a high citation journal.

      I, for one, welcome our new genetically modified Chinese overlords.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheSync ( 5291 )

        It took from 1973 to 1978 for human work on in-vitro fertilization to work well. And still today, most embryos developed for IVF do not "take".

    • I think the cautionary tale comes from applying what we've learned from GMO in other sectors. Try this on for size: So your parents were told there was a 50% chance of producing offspring with a debilitating genetic disease. A Chinese based company offers a service where they perform an in vitro fertilization with genetic modification to reduce the chance the disease manifests to 0%. Your parents go ahead with the procedure and, voila, you're born to a disease free, healthy life; that is until you decide to
    • I for one welcome our new genetically modified overlords!
  • Here we come!
  • you know, gene wars.

  • Sad state of research in the West (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:17PM (#49532553)

    We've been hindered by what is basically a cult ideology about unborn life that we cannot do experiments like this (legally) in the west. Now China, India and countries that do not have these religious groups hindering progress are making advances in all sorts of science. It is legal to experiment on creatures that are 98% similar to us, the embryos are practically indistinguishable from ours.

    • Haven't you heard? Monkeys are people. We're digressing here in the west.

    • We've been hindered by what is basically a cult ideology about unborn life that we cannot do experiments like this (legally) in the west.

      The fact that this experiment was done in China rather than "the West" has nothing to do with religion. The application of the CRISPR-Cas system for genetic modification was only discovered in 2012, and molecular analyses and proof-of-concept experiments - performed in the US and Europe, mostly - are being published in high-profile journals almost every month. There are,

      • PS. US scientists are also pursuing embryonic gene therapy [sciencemag.org] (albeit using different technology). Of course, because they're not simply trying to win massive publicity, and want to actually understand the system first, they're using mouse embryos for now.

  • You thought cheap labor was scary... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:17PM (#49532561) Journal

    Now we gotta compete with 1 billion people having IQ's of 300 and people skills.

  • We design our hardware, why not wetware? (Score:3)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:33PM (#49532701)
    Evolution got us this far, but to go further we will have to take it into our hands. We need to become smarter, live longer, and be more rational. It will take forever and a day to get there natural way. By then all resources will be gone and we will forever be stuck on this rock.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You started off well but why finish with that tired Space Nutter cliché about "this rock"? Can you explain to me how Mars, for example, is not also a "rock"? A far deadlier, colder, remote one.

      I don't know why your religion talks in a disparaging way about our wonderful planet as a "rock", but yet your main motivation for going to space is ... to have access to rocks.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You focus on the wrong word. Go back one more. Suck on *this* rock. Singular, specific. Mars is a second point of existence, where a catastrophic event would need to be several magnitudes larger (Sol going nova, for example), rather than just nuclear holocaust, to wipe out humans. Move beyond the solar system, and we would have more chance of surviving what nature throws at us, and what we throw at each other.

        • You focus on the wrong word. Go back one more. Suck on *this* rock. Singular, specific. Mars is a second point of existence, where a catastrophic event would need to be several magnitudes larger (Sol going nova, for example), rather than just nuclear holocaust, to wipe out humans. Move beyond the solar system, and we would have more chance of surviving what nature throws at us, and what we throw at each other.

          Well put, if I had mod points you would get em! Rather than expounding and expanding upon the theme, but what the heck here goes my karma...

          One thing that always struck me as sickening was the implications of a ban on nuclear testing in outer space. If one considers the potential for extra atmospheric atomic power, testing nuclear technology in space is essential. The vacuum of space is the only safe place to constructively explode or experiment with dangerous fissile radioactive materials. Cooling reactio

      • Perhaps it's just that the "other rocks" might not have Luddites on them.

      • Being stuck on any planet is a bad idea. Down at the bottom of a gravity well. We need to engineer ourselves to better tolerate space conditions and live in orbital habitats. And by the time we're engineered in such a way, we'd probably be better described as "hardware".

        I mean, tolerance of cold temperatures, high radiation, vacuum, lack of oxygen, gravity, liquid water.... Everything you'd need to be at home in space. And then you're hardware. And interchangeable parts would be cool. If your eye off

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sinij ( 911942 )
          When we fully understand it, wetware will likely be most efficient form of hardware. Nature tends to favor efficiency for a given environment, we need to borrow this efficiency and adjust it for a different environment. Something like neuron-like nets driven by nano-based neurotransmitters implemented in ceramics?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        "This rock" is a short form for a "single planet we live on". I am talking about extinction-level events. If we have two planets with sustainable human population, then humanity could survive a lot more adverse events.

        Based on geological record, civilization-ending events are rather frequent on cosmological scale. If our civilization is to survive for more than couple thousand years, we have to concern ourselves with such possibilities.

    • If we gain control of human evolution, getting off this rock will be greatly facilitated by being able to create human "forks" adapted to conditions on some of the othe rocks in our vicinity. Instead of having to terraform them to our current liking, we can do "terraforming lite," in places that we meet halfway with versions of humanity adapted for thinner air, lower gravity, or perchlorates in your cricket flour.

  • While we've been busy distracting ourselves with purely ideological debate that can neither demonstrate a definitive start nor end of human life, the Chinese have been busy figuring out how to make that life "better" (for various definitions of better). I've yet to hear a single argument that can define life beginning at conception, whose logic can also be applied to define the end of life.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      Actually considering ethics in science isn't what I'd call a waste of time. If we'd done that more in the past, we might not have walked into some of the shit we have to worry about today.

      And as for the start of life argument, I don't see what conception has to do with death. I presume you're talking about the issue of determining if someone is really "dead" who is in a vegetative state and how that's the same as being a non-thinking bunch of cells.

      It's actually not really all that difficult to separate t

  • Good for them! I'm excited to see what new knowledge this will bring everyone!

  • So worried about Orwell we forgot about Huxley... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:39PM (#49532747)

    A brave new world indeed.

    • Huxley's world is great:
      1) Sad? Take a pill and be happy again
      2) Everyone's happy with their lot in life
      3) Have sex with anyone you want
      4) Along with #4, no worries about unwanted pregnancies

      I don't see the problem.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        5. Be brain damaged from birth and programmed to clean my house, you filthy Epsilon.

      • That sounds pneumatic!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dabadab ( 126782 )

      21. century: when "they lived happily ever after" is a distopyia.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • No points for second place (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Heap all the criticism on the science that you want. Ethical or otherwise genetic manipulation WILL become a reality soon. The first nation to perfect and implement it will command a large advantage over the rest of the world.

    Those without the "gift" won't be able to keep up much less compete. The only lesson to be learned here is this:

    Playing by ethical rules will only put you at a disadvantage. Either get over the fear of the unknown, or fade away into obsolescence within a generation or two.

  • Call them; (Score:3)

    by Lost Penguin ( 636359 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @10:29PM (#49533671)
    GMBro?

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