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The article doesn't explain what the unintended mutations might be..?
http://www.chictr.org.cn/Ajax/Download.aspx?type=downloadfil...
some are marked as benign, some likely pathogenic
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What good will a superior understanding of gene editing be if we cease being a civilized society where scientific research can be nurtured in the first place? Ethics are not optional to science, they are integral to the social foundation upon which science rests.
Ethics (e.g., scruples against fabricating research for personal gain) are actually what keeps Western science a cut above Eastern science. Obviously, though, ethics aren't a binary concept; you can value eugenics at the expense of suffering and be committed to the quality of your research. And good science knows no politics. People do, though, and they're the scientists.
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The genes won't care that the scientists playing with them were unethical. The only reason your attitude seems appealing is because nobody wants to believe eventually this strategy will give the Chinese a superior understanding of gene editing.
The cost of ethical science is well known, and still proper democratic countries deny themselves the ignorance of human rights that is prevalent in China. Your comments read like quoted from Nazi Germany medical research in the 1940s. Welcome to the present.
Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level. the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs du…
For the most part mutations like that simply reduce the reproductive viability of the offspring. We can't really poison the entire human genome worldwide without going to absolute extremes. Could we engineer a human so irresistibly sexually desirable and voracious that they could spread their genetic material with a subtle recessive defect across the globe in the span of a generation so that it could take effect befo…
Not prohibited in China by ethics or legality.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2182964/chin...
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For the most part mutations like that simply reduce the reproductive viability of the offspring. We can't really poison the entire human genome worldwide without going to absolute extremes. Could we engineer a human so irresistibly sexually desirable and voracious that they could spread their genetic material with a subtle recessive defect across the globe in the span of a generation so that it could take effect befo…
Dunno, but all kinds of things could happen with novel co-dependent alleles with devistating effects when the express. Imagine theres a cool gene edit in 100 years that lets you live to 200 easy and it becomes normal for most people to get it. But, it just so happens that thers an early gene edit that was available 20 years from now, less ethically created and expensive. but hundreds of thousands of people get that f…
Then people who chose that mating pair will get weeded out. It sucks to be the individual victims of that, but that's not a big deal for the species.
In addition, biological systems almost always have variation. Even Ebola isn't 100% fatal. So, even if you have an interaction, some people will have another mutation that deactivates the interaction.
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I don't follow. Gametes are isolated from many viral infections, but even assuming that a gamete undergoes viral mutagenesis, that's not evolutionarily novel (viruses follow relatively predictable insertion patterns, and transposons are basically degenerate/grounded viruses that are almost certain to generate mutation events in any given zygote, unlike viral mutagenesis). It's also outside our control, unlike germlin…
Sure, they are more isolated. And in some ways they are more fragile. But my point is that they're not nearly as fragile as we believed. And more importantly a faulty premise--that they're extremely fragile--gave way to a faulty scientific conclusion--that gametes were impervious to common environmental stressors like the many infections that ravage our bodies. We can't draw simple, categorical conclusions about gene…
You're arguing from some abstract philosophical perspective, but the practical situation is much simpler. Nobody is drawing categorical conclusions and saying that we should never edit the germline, and at the same time the opinion that we should do germline editing right now is fringe. The tools, while much better than ten years ago, still suck. Outside a few well-characterized alleles in Mendelian diseases, nobody knows what to edit, what side effects edits will have or why. It's likely that in a few years we will know, given that we're quickly improving both the molecular techniques and the genome knowledge bases necessary to understand the consequences of the edits. But until then, it's dangerous and unethical to experiment on babies without their consent or pressing medical need, and scientists are right to freak out about it.
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The tech won't exist In a vacuum though. Suppose this eventually gives the Chinese an edge in precision medicine, your hands might be clean as far as the messy work but unless you ban citizens from visiting how are you going to regulate the health products that will emerge eventually? We can bury our heads in the sand but eventually the rising tide will get our socks wet unless we have the foresight to prepare a litt…
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/…
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The tech won't exist In a vacuum though. Suppose this eventually gives the Chinese an edge in precision medicine, your hands might be clean as far as the messy work but unless you ban citizens from visiting how are you going to regulate the health products that will emerge eventually? We can bury our heads in the sand but eventually the rising tide will get our socks wet unless we have the foresight to prepare a litt…
Look again lots of people here are saying that the research can continue but must be held to not only ethical but engineering standards of the highest order. If youre willing to compromise on those to achieve strategic goals between nation states, than thats a political or moral distinction and ill let it weigh on your conscience if you create a generation of infertile children 80 years from now.