• Etterra@discuss.online
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    49 minutes ago

    Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That’s their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.

  • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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    2 hours ago

    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.

    • comfy@lemmy.ml
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      48 minutes ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

      Laws were changed after this incident:

      In 2020, the National People’s Congress of China passed Civil Code and an amendment to Criminal Law that prohibit human gene editing and cloning with no exceptions

      So, in case you actually meant that weird ignorant remark you made about Uyghurs, the answer is no and no.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      Nah, I’m pretty sure that’s the dude that used crispr on some babies years ago in an attempt to make them immune to HIV or something.

  • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
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    8 hours ago

    If a person’s criticism is of “ethics” in general, that individual should not be allowed in a position of authority or trust. If you have a specific constraint for which you can make a case that it goes too far and hinders responsible science and growth (and would have repeatable, reliable results), then state the specific point clearly and the arguments in your favor.

    • NeatoBuilds@lemmy.today
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      6 hours ago

      So if we put these extra pair of legs on babies then they can stand in more extreme angles making them better at construction at a time when there is a housing shortage

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      And we already have a safety valve for when conventional ethics is standing in the way of vital research: the researchers test on themselves.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine

      If it’s that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

      It’s not terribly common because most useful research is perfectly ethical, but we have a good number of cases of researchers deciding that there’s no way for someone to ethically volunteer for what they need to do, so they do it to themselves. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they make very valuable discoveries. Sometimes both.

      So the next time someone wantz to strap someone to a rocket engine and fire it into a wall, all they have to do is go first and be part of the testing pool.

      • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 hour ago

        If it’s that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

        You can’t really do the kind of experiments being done genetically modifying growing infants on yourself, I imagine. Not that that should be an excuse, of course.

  • Hikuro-93@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before, specially on war times. And each time humanity concluded that some knowledge has too high a price and we’re better off not finding out some things.

    Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, especially with a heavy blood cost, isn’t the way to progress as a species.

    And I should know, as a person greatly defined by curiosity about everything and more limited emotional capacity than other people due to mental limitations.

    • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      28 minutes ago

      If you’re talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.

      They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn’t, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.

      It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.

    • angrystego@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.

    • Dengalicious@lemmygrad.ml
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      5 hours ago

      You can critique him all you want but how in the world did you come to the conclusion that his and goals were knowledge for knowledge’s sake?

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    9 hours ago

    Ethics mean we don’t know what the average human male erect penis size is.

    No, really. The ethics of the studies say that a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis. Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error. There are ways to induce an erection with an injection, so they use that.

    Is the size of an induced erection the same as a sexually aroused erection? Probably in the same ballpark, but we don’t really know.

    Source: Dr Nicole Prause, neurologist specializing in sexuality, on Holly Randall’s podcast.

  • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    Not that I support it in any way of course, but he’s not wrong. There’s probably a lot of medical knowledge to be gained by seeing how the babies he experimented on develop in the future. It’s just that the ends don’t justify the means.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      Eh, usually less than you would expect. We’re really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it’s been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.

      We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn’t get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.

      It’s how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we’re intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don’t and look at them.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it’s stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who’s been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren’t much use.

      • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
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        6 hours ago

        I’m pretty sure that 80% if what we learned from the Nazi/Imperial Japan super unethical experiments was “what can a psychotic doctor justify in order to have an excuse to torture people to death.”

        Maybe 20% was arguably useful, and most of that could have been researched ethically with other methods.

      • Comrade Spood@slrpnk.net
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        5 hours ago

        The potential value to the Americans of Japanese-provided data, encompassing human research subjects, delivery system theories, and successful field trials, was immense. However, historian Sheldon H. Harris concluded that the Japanese data failed to meet American standards, suggesting instead that the findings from the unit were of minor importance at best. Harris characterized the research results from the Japanese camp as disappointing, concurring with the assessment of Murray Sanders, who characterized the experiments as “crude” and “ineffective.”

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

        To back up your point that the research gained by unit 731 was useless.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Better build a research base on Mars where legal and ethical limitations don’t exist. And IDK, start researching teleportation or something.

    • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
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      8 minutes ago

      Preferably just die because he opened a portal to hell or something.

  • KayLeadfoot@fedia.io
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    9 hours ago

    I know him!!! He featured heavily in that one Walter Isaacson biography, The Codebreaker. About Dr. Doudna of course.

    Did he get his PHD? Well, good on him. I see China has a better anti-recidivism program than the USA has. Last I heard, he was doing hard time in Chinese prison for mad scientist stuff.