I have no objections to this.
Why as it prevents the spread of a disease and it can be used as a study to track the development of the children to ensure that theses changes infact work and can be rolled out on a wider scale in the future; Similar to how IBF was developed and tested having the children then check to see that there were no defects that would harm the greater population and to see that it is safe.
Genetic engineering is an interesting craft that could be used to cure some series disease aswell as give your child an extra finger to play piano.
Not to disagree, but how far will genetic engineering go if left untethered? I know too little about the field to speculate as to whether or not it could be the latest Pandora's box, but I'm sure there's at least a chance of it being used negatively. Someone can kindly correct me.
using crispr to maybe activate a gene making them HIV resistant is such a massively dangerous and really unnessicary thing that might have perminanetly crippled the girls before they were even born. We don't know if he was successful, we don't know what damage he caused, and we don't know what the long term effects are and he's brought two people into the world that have to live with his science experiment for their entire lives.
Hence why we're testing it on a single species of mosquito on an isolated island away from other ecosystems and not say, girls who can give birth with mutated changes we make in a populated nation inside a major city.
This guy is 100% a scapegoat, there is no way he alone could get some other PEOPLE to be experimented on, not to mention all the resources and labs that he had access to. The higher ups must have known this and he's just taking the blame when it blown up.
It is still a huge moral question within the scientific community.
On one hand we could eradicate a lot of diseases, disabilities and maybe even extent life as we know it.
On the other, it could lead to parents to choose sex, gene-separation/inequality and even the government could enforce gene-tech onto its population. And what if something goes wrong?
I fear that China have opened a can of worms, that can't be closed again.
The problem is, from what I remember reading the last time this came up, was that it was also really bad science (not that that would justify his actions). Changes to the genome weren't probably tracked and controls weren't in place (I don't even know where to begin to approach that) so it'll be next to impossible to determine if any benefits or side effects were due to the modification. They basically exposed the patients to a lot of potential harm for not very much benefit. And it would have made so much more sense for a fatal Gene to be targetted. The reason that I'm assuming he targetted a potential HIV resistance Gene was because they had experience with it so that it was easier for them to do it quickly and claim to be first.
Like I said before, we ain't responsible enough to use gene editing beyond fixing defects and preventing diseases.
Rich people would be able to afford designer babies, while poor people cannot. This could create a massive amount of inequality were people that have money are basically a master race that have all of the jobs, opportunity and schooling with poor people having zero chance of escaping poverty.
Imagine if your gene-editing caused a change (could be on-target or off-target) that resulted in severe dementia or a nasty form a cancer, but only after 50 years. By then, the person could have propagated the gene across two generations before it could possibly be caught, likely more because it would take time to identify the gene. What's going to happen to the patients who had their genome altered? Will they be watched their entire lives? Will they able allowed to have children or perhaps they'll be forcefully sterilised?
Gattaca when?
There's even questions of morality with respect to eliminating genetic disorders. Some autistic people consider autism to be a part of their personality that they would not want to lose. If we were to use gene editing to prevent autism, we could prevent a lot of suffering, but we could also be getting rid of an entire community of people which don't necessarily want to stop existing. There's definitely more cut and dry genetic disorders out there but man gene editing comes with some massive moral dilemmas that we haven't even begun to sort out yet.
My primary concern is that we end up with a monsanto style monoculture.
most of our agraculture is heavily modified, based on the supergrains that were invented to solve the indian famine. While this increased yield by order of magnitude, we've ended up with a monoculture, as all our food is very genetically similar, meaning if some superbug could fuck up one of our crops, it can wipe out all of our crops of that type. This is a seriously big ticking bomb that we're doing little about.
However, while that's pretty bad, imagine if we did the same to people, where one bad bug could wipe out everyone because some combination of our edits (like say, a pre-emptive vaccine anologue) made us vulnurable to black death v2, with no genetic diversity to ensure survival.
It's a super far off scanario, but it's possible, and we've already done something similar to agraculture. I'm all on board for pushing the boundries of science and even what it means to be human, but we have to understand the underlying risks, because there's no undo button for accidentally wiping out everyone.
The dude didn't even do anything properly, there is no guarantee that the kids will actually have the resistance to diseases like he wanted them to, and there is a high chance that these children might have serious disabilities moving forward.
At the same time; what will it take for regressive nations like say Pakistan or Saudi Arabia to force gene-editing to remove the gay gene.
Like, its an easy target to hit crippling diseases that cause nothing but pain; but we've had genocides over nose sizes. This is incredibly dangerous and we need a moral and ethical standard to follow.
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