China Halts Work by Team on Gene-Edited Babies (apnews.com) 80
China's government ordered a halt Thursday to work by a medical team that claimed to have helped make the world's first gene-edited babies, as a group of leading scientists declared that it's still too soon to try to make permanent changes to DNA that can be inherited by future generations. AP reports: Chinese Vice Minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping told state broadcaster CCTV that his ministry is strongly opposed to the efforts that reportedly produced twin girls born earlier this month. Xu called the team's actions illegal and unacceptable and said an investigation had been ordered, but made no mention of specific actions taken. Researcher He Jiankui claims to have altered the DNA of the twins to try to make them resistant to infection with the AIDS virus. Mainstream scientists have condemned the experiment, and universities and government groups are investigating. His experiment "crossed the line of morality and ethics adhered to by the academic community and was shocking and unacceptable," Xu said. A group of leading scientists gathered in Hong Kong this week for an international conference on gene editing, the ability to rewrite the code of life to try to correct or prevent diseases.
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Yes China is just one person.
Fake science is everywhere, false claims are made everywhere* - but only the one Chinese (only one of those remember) is relevant for our brave AC.
(* Favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
Re: China Coverup On Fake Science (Score:2)
Did your social credit score go up defending China's face?
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Fake science is everywhere, false claims are made everywhere*
Yes, fake science occurs everywhere, but not at the same levels. I have lived in China, and I am married to a Chinese woman, and I can tell you that lying and deception is far more tolerated in their culture than it is in America.
(* Favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
Poor example. This was a Japanese researcher who's fraud was exposed by Japan's own scientific community. Their internal system fixed the problem.
That happens less frequently in China, where fraud is often only exposed when the claims are big enough to draw international scrutin
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Lying is fine, _everywhere_.
Lying badly and getting caught has a social cost, everywhere.
Peer review is supposed to catch liars, but when nobody reads 75% of papers...
Re:China Coverup On Fake Science (Score:4, Interesting)
Lying badly and getting caught has a social cost, everywhere.
Not really. China is a low trust society [wikipedia.org]. Chinese people don't trust each other, they expect others to try to cheat them, and if they think they can get away with cheating others, they are often willing to try.
But this also means that dishonesty is so widespread that they have no choice but to tolerate it. If an employee is fired every time they are caught lying/cheating/stealing, the company will soon have no workers and be out of business. So instead, they use one of two solutions: 1) Hire only your own family. This is common in China, and is a reason why they have many many tiny companies, a few gigantic SOEs, and almost nothing in between. 2) Have excessive cross checks and controls. In many Chinese department stores, a checker totals up your items and bags them, then gives you a receipt, and then you go to a separate cashier desk to actually pay. This way the owner has to trust or monitor only the one cashier, and not the six checkers.
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I don't trust my fellow Americans or Germans (dual citizen).
Re:China Coverup On Fake Science (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't trust my fellow Americans or Germans (dual citizen).
Do you buy products without opening the box first to see if it is full of sawdust?
Do you wear a knapsack on your back in a crowd, rather than shifting it around to your chest so no one slices the bottom with a razor?
Do you share information with your co-workers, even when you are not required to do so?
Do you feed your baby domestically produced baby formula?
If you do any of these things, then you trust your fellow citizens more than Chinese do.
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One more to add to your list:
Have you ever been sold fake eggs before [chinasmack.com]?
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That's nothing, I was given fake water once. The label clearly said 'water' but it obviously tasted, looked and smelled exactly like urine.
Last time I grab a bottle of water on a roadtrip after being told to "use this".
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Not really. China is a low trust society [wikipedia.org].
That is a piece of information I have never heard of before. I clicked the link and found a very short Wikipedia article. None of the sources were websites. All of the information came from these things called "books". I guess I will have to go visit the keeper of the books at that place we used to go to before the internet. I forget what it's called.
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Legend has it that amazon.com used to sell books, aeons ago.
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The main cause of low trust in a society is that competition is high. China has 1.4 billion people and many are still poor. There are over 7 million college graduates every year.
You can compare their trust level to that of the Americans before the 1930's.
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In many Chinese department stores, a checker totals up your items and bags them, then gives you a receipt, and then you go to a separate cashier desk to actually pay. This way the owner has to trust or monitor only the one cashier, and not the six checkers. ...
In Thailand is it the opposite way around, you pay and get the stuff bagged and get a recipe.
In the exit area your bags are checked versus the recipe
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Even Soviet Russiaâ(TM) didn't have 100% control of different internal development, China isn't even close to that in the first place. Think capitalism under the watchful eyes of dear leader Xi Jinping.
Can you spot the Chinese cow in this herd? (Score:1)
Missed Opportunity... (Score:2)
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Lack of oversight as long as you don't attract too much attention. The idiot at the head of the team decided to start giving interviews that made international news.
Not sure if he was that stupid in things outside his field or realised that he's got too much publicity already and was trying to sell his project to party leadership before he was inevitably going to get shut down by party apparatus clamping down on his "actions that are damaging harmony in society".
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You can do ethically questionable studies. You just cannot make the state look bad, lessen state control over the populace, or make the state weaker. If you publish a report that makes the state look bad internationally (we're making super-babies) you'll get smacked down.
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How do you come to the idea that a totalitarian state has "lack of oversight"?
Off target effects (Score:2)
But in humans? You get one shot, and it better work exa
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They don't vaccinate babies either, to prove how strong their immune systems are, right? No? This is no different.
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Once human genetic engineering become possible, a few hundred years in the future this kind of ethics will be the ethics held by those who will be known as "ancient ancestors that went extinct under competitive pressure with us".
Which is why anyone with interest in continuation of their lineage will now be pouring resources into it.
Most people living their comfortable lives in Western cities tend to forget something that everyone else remains acutely aware of. Evolution hasn't stopped. It's chugging on. And
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Indeed. Look how common myopia in vision is now, whereas before it would have been a deadly flaw for our ancestors and thus there was a strong selective pressure against it. Even though we now we can wear glasses, (a prosthesis) or undergo surgery to correct for it, this should be unnecessary.
This superstition and resistance to improve the human condition at the genetic level reminds me of how blood-letting was once seen as a practical medical cure. Yes every precaution and great consideration should be
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Fun part about your analogy. World average IQ is in fact about 20 points higher than it was about a hundred years ago. Biggest suppressing element on IQ until modernity was childhood starvation.
We still have the test cases in places like Malawi, where children were starving just a few decades ago. And now, they have a severe problem with competitiveness of work force against surrounding states, because those that were starving but survived as children have problems even at rudimentary tasks like doing house
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Perhaps genetic engineering will be the second "removal of childhood starvation" level of civilizational advancement in our lifetimes.
Interesting point, thank you.
So far in my lifetime I've seen the rise of the internet and telecommunications. Now it is common for even gradeschool children to carry incredibly compact and powerful multi-function computers that can utilize the global data infrastructure for instantaneous communication. Further societal changes due to rapid onset of technological development in the next several decades doesn't seem all that far-fetched.
It's actually a cause for a bit of hope.
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imagine what our world might be like if the average IQ was just 20 points higher. That alone is worth some risks.
From an ethical point of view: that only means, the psychopaths in business and government have a stronger grip on the less priviledged, those with less IQ.
The ethical question is: do you want gene editing on perfect healthy embryos? Why? Is the edited gene transferred to off springs? What is better: if it is, or if it is not?
Do you want to be dependent in future generations on elite doctors perf
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From an ethical point of view: that only means, the psychopaths in business and government have a stronger grip on the less priviledged, those with less IQ.
At first, sure that is a risk. What do we know about technologies as they mature and become subject to market pressures?
The ethical question is: do you want gene editing on perfect healthy embryos? Why? Is the edited gene transferred to off springs? What is better: if it is, or if it is not?
How that research itself is done ethically is the greater issue. Everything else amounts to putting the cart before the horse.
However, the choice to remain captive to the biology of natural evolution is illogical, when we are no longer subject to normal evolutionary pressures. As products of evolution ourselves there must exist potential for improvement.
For example, let's say that
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As for IQ, if you don't believe that heightened intelligence allows for better capacity for learning,
Yes, it does. But it does not mean the person in question is actually learning something.
problem solving and critical thinking ability,
As long as they have not learned 'problem solving', or 'critical thinking': no.
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Toss that plant and try again.
So long as the gene doesn't spreads to the nearby plants, which we now know can happen like Glyphosate resistance did.
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But just FYI, glyphosate resistance didn't spread to nearby plants from the transgenic ones, it evolved in them. Selection pressure from continued spraying of glyphosate promoted the evolution of resistant weeds, which then had an advantage due to selection pressure, so they proliferated. I get what you're talking about, but that's not how it happened.
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But just FYI, glyphosate resistance didn't spread to nearby plants from the transgenic ones, it evolved in them.
How do you know that?
We know since the 1930s that horizontal gene transfer between plants does exist.
it evolved in them. Selection pressure from continued spraying of glyphosate promoted the evolution of resistant weeds
How do you know that?
Watched them evolving?
I get what you're talking about, but that's not how it happened.
Sorry, the likelihood that your parent is right, is probably a million tim
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So how are they going to test this? Expose them to HIV?
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They were given a gene that's been studied for decades and is known to confer HIV resistance. If they're confirmed to have the gene, then experiment successful. A bigger question is if they're chimeras, with some of their cells having the gene and others not, in which case HIV could infect the cells that don't, thus leading to AIDS anyway.
Dear One (Score:2)
You're only useful to the Glory of the Leader until you aren't.
one less scientist (Score:2)
wanna bet? (Score:2)
This is no different than China's gov claiming that they were stopping large numbers of new coal plants and once their bad economy turned, they restarted the projects.
THis group will go underground. literally and figuratively, to continue this work. They are learning how to make a body resist HiV. Later on, it will be other virus, such as a synthetic smallpox. Welcome to the soluti
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The primary ethical principle of any state is state survival. It overrides everything else.
That is because if you do not have survival, everything else is taken from you. This is not unique to humans, or even animals. This is a base principle of evolutionary process itself. And yes, that's one of the pathways to being the winners in the evolutionary race in the long run.
Bun in the Oven (Score:2)
sure (Score:2)
they may say one thing, and do another.
as if china isn't massivly interested in developing this (well, probably not only china).