this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Is nobody concerned that illegal experiments on babies only gets you 3 years?
Maybe they were Uyghurs so it was classified as "property damage" in Chinese law.
The devil is in the details....
You are likely thinking (as I am) that he implanted robotic arms on babies but he may have just rubbed sage oil on them for all we know
He used CRISPR to make babies immune to HIV.
No, he inserted a gene that is associated with resistance to HIV, but is also associated with increased risk of some cancers. He did this without informed consent, he did this without running it by an ethics board, he did this without knowing whether it would work or not.
Let’s stop pretending that he’s a good guy that just magically made HIV immune babies.
Edit: it also didn’t work. The babies have genes both with and without the mutation.
We also don't know if it was just that gene that was altered, or if there are other effects. Modern gene editing isn't so precise that we can edit just the gene we want. A lot of genes with similar sequences as the target can also be affected.
It's basically like firing a shotgun at the house they live in. You might hit the one you want, but you may also hit other unrelated genes in the process.
Diabolical
Thanks for the info
definitely on the evil side considering he probably planed to infect them to test his theories
Nope, he had no plans to infect them. The babies had parents who were HIV-positive.
Wow you are jumping to a lot of stupid ass conclusions for someone who won't google a name.
Fine, give him your baby to experiment then
You're not ok
Did not have baby zombie apocalypse on my Bingo card, but there ya go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
Laws were changed after this incident:
So, in case you actually meant that weird ignorant remark you made about Uyghurs, the answer is no and no.
Oh shit someone tell the ~~fascist scum~~ liberal toads that its actually blue on blue, this guy was working for a honky kong universty!!!
Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their "cHiNa BaD" circlejerk.
It was a joke... You don't get to jail for experimenting with slaves in China.
Thanks for the information -- good to know. I assume that like American law, he couldn't be punished for something that wasn't illegal when he did it?
Regarding the Uyghur comment the other guy made, definitely a bit tasteless but I don't think it's that ignorant given the genocide China perpetrated against them.
What he did was illegal. Even without specific laws about genetic modification or cloning, he did perform experiments with babies without the necessity approvals from ethics and safety, without informed consent from the parents and likely misusing funds allocated to other research.
3 years is still to short.
I don't think CCP cares about the principle of no ex post facto punishments.
Source: My racism
"If everything else fails, pull the racism card"
Source: the ml handbook
Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.
It's literal misinformation, so it probably should be removed, yes.
Hong kongs a dictatorship? You know, the place this doctor was working?
Well observed, its been an apartheid state since its inception as a colony to the UK.
Why did you self censor by saying "dot"?
I wrote that on my phone's touch keyboard, and I didn't want to use
\.to escape the dot character to avoid autohotlinking.I've blocked that instance, but if they need more material to ban me I have it.
Who cares about a tankie instance?
Depends how successful the experiment is (and probably on what the goal is as well).
If he'd been testing the effects of grass vs grain feed on human fat marbling, I'd imagine the sentence would have been a little more severe
And China executed a shitload of people for political dissent...
And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?
A lot of contexts? Like the development depending on formula vs mother's milk? Experimenting doesn't need to mean vivisection or injecting unregulated drugs, but if you need to do the experiments illegally, I'm not sure it was something "safe"
Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?
Not babies, embyros