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The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day
- bencollier49 8y agoWow, the fact that he is called He really confused me there.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoI just read it as extremely funny christian fanfic. "After the talk, He revealed another pregnancy is on the way". "It is still unclear if He did what he claims to have done." "But He appears to have leapfrogged over all of those basic checks"
- checkdigit15 8y ago"5. He operated under a cloak of secrecy..." Well, they say He works in mysterious ways...
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- plgonzalezrx8 8y agoThe way this article is written makes me appreciate when articles address the parties involved by Title and Name instead of He or She or just his first name. Mr. Jiankui would have been less confusing. Editors should be able to identify issues like this and adjust the writing to avoid confusion IMHO.
- dwighttk 8y agoWould it be Mr. Jiankui or Mr. He?
- mbrubeck 8y ago"He" (贺) is his family name, so it would be Dr. He.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lampington 8y agoUsing that in the article would have made things much less confusing. But journalists tend to avoid titles - perhaps especially when the person in question has apparently done something bad.
- saagarjha 8y agoThe name of the researcher is He Jiankui. Edit: it looks the parent comment was edited after I posted this, and said something along the lines of "I wish articles used the researcher's actual name instead of He or She".
- ginko 8y ago'He' is his surname.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 8y ago> Mr. Jiankui He is his family name, Jiankui is his first name. That'd be like calling Dennis Ritchie "Mr. Dennis" throughout an article.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoSurely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name as in China the given name comes second, no? So, He Jiankui [xiansheng?] for how Westerners would write Mr. Jiankui He. [Corrected, I confused my Oriental honorifics.]
- mediumdeviation 8y agoThe -san suffix is a honorific used in Japanese. Trying to use it for someone from China would be a really awkward faux pas.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoLol, awkward faux pas are my speciality. Thanks.
- jerf 8y ago"Surely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name as in China the given name comes second, no? So, He Jiankui [xiansheng?] for how Westerners would write Mr. Jiankui He." To be honest, if you are not intimately familiar with what names tend to be family names and what names tend to be first name in a given culture, you're just hopelessly boned in English media unless they explicitly call it out for you in the article, because sometimes they leave the names in the Oriental ordering, and sometimes they "conveniently" switch them around for you without saying so. (Statistically speaking, I have to imagine there have been cases where the writer switched it to the English order, and then another writer or the editor switched it again, returning to the Oriental order without realizing it....) The end result is, I suggest everyone cut the English-speakers significant slack on this front when they read an article, because even understanding how names work in the East is still not enough to prevent errors.
- ryanmercer 8y agoWe've got a "Who's on First?" situation here.
- jcims 8y agoThink how simple it would be to 'launder' genetically modified babies (at least in the US). Just leave them on the front step of a hospital and you're good to go. I can't imagine it would be that difficult for a reasonably sophisticated organization to keep track of the child as it grew up, and with popularity of genetic testing you could probably find them again anyway.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoI don’t have the faintest idea of what your scheme is supposed to accomplish? Edit, after turning off strict mode: if you’re thinking of a doctor performing fertility treatments trying to hide their experiments with CRISPR: that’s trivial. Just don’t tell anyone. Stealing babies from mothers after birth to then leave them at hospital doorsteps would actually seem to be ... counterproductive? Edit 2, after consulting my equally puzzled dog: you do realize these babies weren’t actually created in a test tube, right? As in: there were still a womb and the person attached involved in the process.
- imglorp 8y agoIf you wanted to introduce a gene into a population without it being identified as intentional, and by whom. Here's an example for your next scifi thriller: a docility bomb. Identify a few dominant genes that intensify the social conformity bias--it's already hardwired into humans to varying degrees--and make 1000 babies with those adjustments. Leave them on 1000 doorsteps across your opponent's country. If each baby grows and has two children, that's about 3000 in one generation, 9000 in the next, etc. At some point you're affecting the population's voting, working, and revolting tendencies. After what we've seen in long-game US politics lately, this kind of thing is more plausible than reality.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoTo my (very) untrained mind, it does sound like a scifi thriller plot: that is, extremely implausible. First, the logistics of doing gene modifications for 1000 babies and then leaving them on 1000 doorsteps across the a country like the US without getting caught or anyone catching on seems....challenging. Second, each baby won't have two children, at least not in any developed country. The birth rate per woman in the US is at like 1.8 and likely to fall further by the time these babies are able to procreate. This is well below the replacement rate, so even if you select the first generation to only be girls, the second generation would only be ~half girls and it'll shrink from there. So if the birth rate falls to 1.5 and remains constant, the second generation would be 1500, but only 750 girls. The next generation would be 1125, but only 562 girls, etc. Third, even if the birth rate was higher, this would still take forever to have any noticeable effect. Like centuries. Fourth, how do you ensure that these mutations don't migrate into your country? Especially over that kind of time span. Fifth, would these mutations even be stable or predictable over time? No idea, not my field, but I'd be curious. Also, it seems like there's a very good chance they'd be detected with future technology and genetic screening. Finally, this kind of centuries-long quest would compete with a lot of more time-tested ways to destabilize a country. Why not just go to war, use biological weapons, propaganda, economics warfare, cyber warfare, etc, etc? So much easier and you get your results in a decade instead of 300 years.
- ganzuul 8y ago> ... “it’s a fairly outrageous assumption that any change to this region would lead to some benefit,” Ryder says. “He made new mutations, and there’s no reason to think that they’d be protective—or even that they’d be safe.” True. > What’s shocking about this “is the blatant disregard of all the rules and conventions we have in place for how one should approach any proposed intervention,” said Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles, on Twitter. That's like saying no one can stab you because it is illegal. It would seem that the systematic error lies squarely on academia and business ignoring each other for far too long. ED: Clearly I have failed the communicate what I mean... There are two different cultures both using the same tools. One believes it controls the tools and gets to set rules for how they are used. The other does not. Juxtapose, the censorship board for TV in my country, which decided that calling Yugo surplus "genocide canteens" is bad, but reprehensible filth like Fear Factor and Big Brother is OK for prime time. Clearly, opinions do differ and are allowed to differ. - I call into question: Is the case of bioethics vs. business similar?
- simonh 8y ago>> What’s shocking about this “is the blatant disregard of all the rules and conventions we have in place for how one should approach any proposed intervention,” said Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles, on Twitter. >That's like saying no one can stab you because it is illegal. It's like saying no one should stab you because it is illegal.
- ganzuul 8y agoClearly I have failed the communicate what I mean... There are two different cultures both using the same tools. One believes it controls the tools and gets to set rules for how they are used. The other does not. Juxtapose, the censorship board for TV in my country, which decided that calling Yugo surplus "genocide canteens" is bad, but reprehensible filth like Fear Factor and Big Brother is OK for prime time. Clearly, opinions do differ and are allowed to differ. - I call into question: Is the case of bioethics vs. business similar?
- zeroname 8y agoIf it's ethically defensible to abort a child based on its sex (or for any other non-medical reason), it should be ethically defensible to mess with its genome. I, for one, welcome our new Chinese designer baby overlords.
- Gokenstein 8y agoIf it’s legal to drink alcohol and poison yourself it’s no different than pouring arsenic in the water supply and poisoning everyone right?
- mmirate 8y agoHow is improving a handful of people tantamount to poisoning everyone?
- JetSpiegel 8y agoThe point is that those "improvements' will contaminate everyone in the long run.
- zeroname 8y agoPoor comparison. Let's not forget that it's legal for people with hereditary diseases to procreate, would you compare that with "poisoning the water supply"? Furthermore, here are some legal ways to crudely "engineer" the DNA of your future offspring: - smoking - drinking - legal prescription drugs - exposing yourself to ionizing radiation That counts for both males and females, of course with pregnant females the effects are vastly amplified.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoTo only begin to scrape at the trouble with this argument: - it is not actually defensible to abort fetuses based on sex. - genetic engineering might make populations more susceptible to epidemics - it would increase pressure on others, or other nations, to follow suit so as not to fall behind in the “race race” of eugenics - it would seem to devalue non-engineered life, directly threatening the universal dignity of all human beings - your tired meme is tired
- entity345 8y agoWhen it becomes possible to have genetically modified babies in a relatively practical and economical way it will happen. Legal restrictions and ethical concerns will not prevent it. Then what?
- yhoneycomb 8y agoI know this is probably an unpopular opinion, but CRISPR babies were going to happen eventually. Just like the atomic bomb. Not a matter of if, but when. If we don't villainize the creators of the atomic bomb (Fermi, Oppenheimer) I see no reason why we should villainize this man.
- Digit-Al 8y agoIt's not the creator of the atomic bomb that's being criticised, it's the person who's using it to nuke innocent people.
- quotemstr 8y agoThere was nobody strapped down and forcibly injected here. Everything was consensual.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoGiving forms full of technical terms to high-school educated parents is a strange form of consent.
- granshaw 8y agoMy thoughts exactly. The cat is now out of the bag, and the rest of the developed world will now be forced to keep up, even if it’s against their ethics.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoDoesn't look like anybody is scrambling to jump on the train to the lowest possible ethical standard just yet. Even the reaction within China is actually rather encouraging. There are many arguments against allowing such experiments with human life, and it seems as if, just maybe, this could be a case where ethical standards are actually spreading slightly faster than the technology to break them.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
- cauldron 8y agoIt's exposed by prospective subject parents that when asked what if the experiment went wrong, He's assistant simply said "Don't worry, we would help dispose of the baby." The small private hospital that approved and held the experiment is one of the "Pu-tian clique", notorious in China for their customarily misleading, predatory and fraudulent medical pratices. The hospital boss also invested in He's two bio startups, one of which is hawking a failed American 3rd-gen gene sequencing machine "Helicos" that he bought from his American professor, now goes by the name "GenoCare", billed as "the world's most accurate", monopoly-breaking, "fully originally and domestically invented" by him.
- setquk 8y agoThis is sounding like the future that many science fiction authors warned us about. And that's not good at all.
- cauldron 8y agoWhat's more scary is the public opinion about this in China. When first reported on by state media "the People's Daily", being touted as a glorious historical breakthrough, netizens cheered with overwhelming joy and pride. Then came critical pieces, netizens appeared to calmed a bit, "Foreign masters displeased!", some started to worry about it, "What if the girls start to pollute the gene pool? It's horrifying." "It's outrageous and immoral, burn He and the girls to death!" "Sterilize them!" "This is an American conspiracy." "I'll be blunt here, the morons who oppose it, don't ever join the line when gene-optimizing treatments come out." "Human thought can't keep up with the advance of technology, it'd be a disaster." "Some people are always jealous of other country's tech, yet here they also don't want to be the first one."
- zerealshadowban 8y agoIt is only bad fiction writing that attempts to be didactic or prophetic.
- superkuh 8y ago> the "Pu-tian clique", From the outside it seems like they're notorious in China for having power and not being han chinese. Lets not let their ethnic stereotypes go unquestioned.
- brownbat 8y agoJudging from 14 and 15, the gross irresponsibility here is masking a tension in the scientific community: Should gene-edited babies be a scientific goal, and if so how should risks be reduced? (Or, alternately, are they inevitable and how should risks be reduced?)
- jillesvangurp 8y agoPeople making a big stink out of ethical concerns virtually ensure that this stuff is going to happen first in a place with the least concern for ethics. China seems to be where the action is on this front. People worry about designer babies or baby hitlers (to name a few of the cliches). In reality people are trying to fix serious genetic defects and the science to do that in a responsible way is kind of near impossible to conduct in most reputable universities because of ethics. So, it's happening in a much less responsible way elsewhere by people who want to cash in on the obvious demand for any kind of snake oil or real solutions in this space.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoNobody is worried about baby hitlers. As to your other points: Avoiding genetic risks is easily doable with technology that (for that very reason) is generally accepted, such as in-vitro genetic testing for risks, or prenatal screening with the option of abortion. There is opposition to that technology still, which goes to show that the approach you're advocating is actually the status quo. It's not like reproductive medicine has been standing still. Beyond that, I don't see how western democracy embarking on such designer baby experiments would change anything, except for just doing the evil deed ourselves: If we decide something is unethical, having moved the line would not stop others from going further still, at least within the frame of your argument.
- adwn 8y ago> Avoiding genetic risks is easily doable with technology that (for that very reason) is generally accepted, such as in-vitro genetic testing for risks, or prenatal screening with the option of abortion. Woah. I'm not opposed to abortions, but suggesting that killing a future human being due to a gene defect is ethically superior to fixing that defect is beyond comprehension to me. That's on the same level of twisted priorities as Jehovah's Witnesses that would rather let their child die than allow a blood transfusion. At some point you need to take a step back and ask yourself, what is more important: Clinging to some very abstract ethical values, or saving the life of a human being.
- nonbel 8y agoDon't believe it. For the monkey data, they claim at least one cell was "edited" in 80+% of the embryos and that the "edited" embryos survived to blastocyst stage more often than the controls (ie, there was less than zero toxicity): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXy47dWNQApcNLW-bTSfYD2vxBZZ5UIf/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXy47dWNQApcNLW-bTSfYD2vxBZ... I bet this will come out as made up or fatally misinterpreted somehow.
- pulse7 8y agoMaybe this is just a test, how mass media and people would react to something like this...
- nkg 8y agoDamn, "He's" or "his"?!
- nkrisc 8y agoHis name is He Jiankui.
- Laforet 8y agoFew slightly technical things not addressed in the linked article but worth pointing out: - The most prevalent types of HIV prevalent in Asia are the T-tropic X4 strain which does not depend on CCR5 for infection. The proper genetic target CXCR4 is not a viable target for germline gene editing because it's essential for embryo development[0]. In other words, the children would not be immune to HIV in any case. - The editing was done using a single sgRNA template and a 20bp+ deletion cannot be produced with this setup. Therefore it's likely that the experimenters never attempted to replicate the naturally occurring Δ32 variant in the first place. - Δ32 is well studied and known to abolish CCR5 function at both RNA and protein levels. However, both of Nana's CCR5 alleles are novel and it's possible that some function may still be retained because the DNA changes are not extensive enough[1]. These edits really serve no purpose and should never have been implanted. [0]:https://www.nature.com/articles/31261 https://www.nature.com/articles/31261 [1]:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25043019 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25043019
- vibrio 8y ago"The most prevalent types of HIV prevalent in Asia are the T-tropic X4 strain " Great comments. There is (at least there was when I followed this more than a decade ago) some data to support that x4 tropic HIV is more aggressive/pathogenic, so forcing the infection towards x4 tropism by removing CCR5 may increase the virulence of the infection.(with some caveats on this). Independent of that. This is mind-blowingly unethical. At very least, He should be ostracized and provided no opportunity to do science, let alone medicine.
- mmirate 8y ago(Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the details of HIV in particular.) Given that a particular person shall catch a terminal contagion of some sort, is it not preferable that he die to it sooner than later, so as to reduce the number of other people to whom he spreads his infection?
- dhimes 8y agoI thought that this was to be immune from one of the parent's infection. (I haven't read this article though so maybe my info is outdated).
- jimbo1qaz 8y ago"...He spoke at length with bioethicists William Hurlbut at Stanford University, as well as his son Benjamin Hurlbut at Arizona State University, neither of whom was aware of He’s plans. The elder Hurlbut spent time telling He about opposition to the instrumental use of human embryos in the United States, and the grounds for believing that human life begins at conception." Aren't those beliefs themselves harmful?
- dev_north_east 8y agoHow are they harmful?
- dempseye 8y agoIf someone thinks that women ought to be able to exercise control over their reproduction, and that abortion is a legitimate means of exercising that control that accrues benefits to individuals and societies by being legal, then the belief that human life begins at conception, being a traditional argument against the moral permissibility of abortion, could seem harmful. The same applies to stem cell research.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago>> and the grounds for believing that human life begins at conception. > How are they harmful? Because it doesn't stop there. It starts by banning abortion or restricting to some line (heartbeat, 4 weeks, etc..). Doing abortion then turns into murder, and is charged by the state as such. As the radicals (this belief is primarily christian) get more entrenched, then this window slides further into conception=life Then miscarriages and 'intentional miscarriages' itself becomes a crime of murder. This has already happened in Virginia, Tennessee, and other locations around thw rodl: https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a44552/when-a-miscarriage-becomes-a-crime/ https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a44552/when-a-m... Having this belief takes away women's agency of their own bodies. It turns them into second class citizens by making their body worth less than the similar male, solely that they can have a baby.
- agarden 8y ago
- chasd00 8y agoftfa "The children are test subjects for variants that haven’t been vetted in animals," I thought human experimentation like this went out of style after ww2? Isn't this pretty much a crime against humanity now?
- conistonwater 8y agoYes, it kind of is.
- vectorEQ 8y agothis guy writes 'he's' instead of his and after a few of those i got totally put off this article. the whole second point is just moot. That being said, playing with genes is about as good of an idea as running with scissors with our current understanding of them...
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoWell, you missed out on an interesting article. And also I stopped reading your comment when you failed to capitalise "this" at the beginning of a sentence.
- jcranmer 8y agoThe scientist's name is He (pronounced like "hey", I presume). He's is the correct possessive form, not his. Yes, that the name is the same as English's third-plural masculine singular is confusing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TSiege 8y agoThe man's name is He Jiankui. The "He's" are all capitalized since they're are in fact his name.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kitotik 8y ago“He” is the persons name, confusingly.
- ericdykstra 8y agoIt's at least a little bit promising that the reaction to the CRISPR baby has been resoundingly negative. From the technical errors pointed out by scientists in this case, to the visceral reaction to the idea of "designer babies" to most regular citizens. Of course, we have some short-sighted scientists who only care about their own work and not the long-term implications, like He himself and Church, but the actions and words of these two were roundly condemned. Hopefully this buys us enough time to see the real long-term implications of starting a Phenotypic Revolution[1], and we can get some world-wide consensus to stop gene-editing in humans. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1729861563/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1729861563/
- quotemstr 8y agoTo me, the reaction has been thoroughly disappointing. Genetic editing of humans could be the most beneficial medical intervention ever discovered, but almost everyone respectable is calling for a total ban on the technique, ostensibly on the grounds that we lack the precision to do it right. But the real reason, if you read between the lines, is an unfounded and tragic fear of enhancing human capabilities. I reject this mindset. We can and should make better people.
- ericdykstra 8y agoYou’re ignoring the inevitability of a Phenotypic Revolution if we go down that path. Please read the book so you can get an understanding of what’s at stake. It was just released a couple of days ago, but it’s an update to our understanding on the origins and evolution of life forms. If you read it now you can be on the leading edge of these conversations before it hits the mainstream.
- quotemstr 8y agoWhy should I be horrified by the "phenotypic revolution"?
- ericdykstra 8y ago
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoThis is inevitable. Folks with a will to do this (edit embryos) can clearly do so. In fact this 'researcher' (or con man) did it 'in secret' which means without any institutional support. If this guy can do it in his basement, then what hope is there of putting the genie back in the bottle? Folks go to all sorts of crazy medical clinics already, for all sorts of crazy reasons. I predict within the year, the rise of a 'custom baby' clinic in some country with lazy medical ethic enforcement. And folks will flock there and pay through the nose. All the argument in the OP is irrelevant. The technical reasons this instance went wrong are irrelevant. The ethics argument is irrelevant. We have to suit up, to prepare to deal with designer babies among us in their thousands, and soon.
- beerlord 8y agoI agree. We should embrace and get the most out of this technology, not shun it. Same with genetic engineering for plants and animals in the food chain.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoOh I wouldn't go there. What we'll prepare for is the fallout of inexpertly/incompetently applied technologies resulting in fragile, heath-compromised people by the thousands. There's nobody in the baby business that has to be accountable, so they won't. Heck you can buy snake oil on the internet and find out the next day that it doesn't work; yet the snake oil is still for sale. What accountability accrues from gene editing where the effects aren't known for months, years or decades? There will be no accountability.
- zeroname 8y ago> What we'll prepare for is the fallout of inexpertly/incompetently applied technologies resulting in fragile, heath-compromised people by the thousands. In other words, something that we are already dealing with as a consequence of too much fast food and video games.
- 8y ago
- jayrwren 8y ago"He’s team deactivated a perfectly normal gene in an attempt to reduce the risk of a disease that neither child had" WTF, The Atlantic? Get some copy editing.
- folch 8y agoIf you're referring to the use of "He's", the scientist's name is He Jiankui
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