5 ms·

The martyrs of the future are often the demons of their time

by The_rationalist 5y ago

elliekelly 5y ago
Conducting experiments on people without consent does not a martyr make.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  embryos are not people. Unless everyone has suddenly turned into an enthusiastic pro-lifer it seems bizarre to me why destruction or termination of children with genetic defects is supposedly ethical, but trying to prevent them is not. By definition unborn children or infants cannot give consent. That has never been the basis for denying them medical treatment, including experimental ones. And in the entire history of medicine no established treatment exists without experimentation. If this is even remotely successful you may be looking at millions of lives saved by preventative HIV treatment in regions where the disease still kills millions. A 40 year old woman getting pregnant probably poses higher risks for their offspring than a lot of genetic experimentation. Is there any risk basis for these arguments or are people just apprehensive about gene-editing due to some naturalistic dogma? Just to think through this, people with Huntington's can, with a 50% chance, bring kids into the world who are doomed to basically die of a horrific disease, that's considered the personal right of parents. But the same parents couldn't subject some cells to treatment to attempt to prevent this, that's unethical?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I agree that embryos are not people. However, modifying the genome of an embryo that you intend and expect to become a human is modifying the genome of that human. Therefore, if it would be unethical to do it to the human, it’s unethical to do it to the embryo.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      Why is modification of someone's genome unethical? If you could get gene editing right now to never contract HIV that would simply be a very effective medical treatment.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    But the parents are humans and he didn’t get informed consent from them: > The scientist forged documents from an ethics review panel to recruit couples for the research
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Preserving the status quo doesn't make you a hero either. HIV resistance is optional, sure. What about conceiving a child with sickle cell anemia? Why is that more ethical than trying to give a child a healthier life? We do a lot of medical treatments on children without their consent. There are now (experimental!) open-heart surgeries of children in the womb. Is that unacceptable too?
  - krisoft 5y ago
    I’m not sure what you are arguing about. There is a process to decide if a medical procedure is ethical or not. It involves an ethics board where people who know much more about both ethics and the proposed procedure than the average HN commenter make a decision. If you feel this process did come up with bad decisions please elaborate. But the researcher in question didn’t bother to get a decision, just falsified one for himself. That doesn’t sound right, really.
    - quinnjh 5y ago
      In Hitler's Ethic Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. https://www.csustan.edu/history/hitlers-ethic https://www.csustan.edu/history/hitlers-ethic Further- if we use dynamical system theory and look at coastal engineering-when we apply a control (say a barrier wall or "groyne" at the beach, to retain the nice sand) mother nature with time will work around it (the sand is carried by the tide and waves to carve out of the beach and deposit on the back of the retaining wall) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-The-terminal-groyne-syndrome-occurring-in-Southwick-beach-in-West-Sussex-where-the_fig1_347353047/amp https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-The-terminal-groyne-sy... Engineering nature properly requires a liberatory embrace of differentiation, diversity, and ultimately futility. The natSoc obsession with systemic perfection and crystallization leads somewhere predictable, and we rightly stamped the movement out (though many of the doctors worked w and moved to the US, and allies have had their share of eugenic fantasies and doctrines). We need to wake up from the childlike belief in the infallibility of scientism. As Richard Feynman put it: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"

The martyrs of the future are often the demons of their time

elliekelly 5y ago

Conducting experiments on people without consent does not a martyr make.

Barrin92 5y ago
embryos are not people. Unless everyone has suddenly turned into an enthusiastic pro-lifer it seems bizarre to me why destruction or termination of children with genetic defects is supposedly ethical, but trying to prevent them is not. By definition unborn children or infants cannot give consent. That has never been the basis for denying them medical treatment, including experimental ones. And in the entire history of medicine no established treatment exists without experimentation. If this is even remotely successful you may be looking at millions of lives saved by preventative HIV treatment in regions where the disease still kills millions. A 40 year old woman getting pregnant probably poses higher risks for their offspring than a lot of genetic experimentation. Is there any risk basis for these arguments or are people just apprehensive about gene-editing due to some naturalistic dogma? Just to think through this, people with Huntington's can, with a 50% chance, bring kids into the world who are doomed to basically die of a horrific disease, that's considered the personal right of parents. But the same parents couldn't subject some cells to treatment to attempt to prevent this, that's unethical?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I agree that embryos are not people. However, modifying the genome of an embryo that you intend and expect to become a human is modifying the genome of that human. Therefore, if it would be unethical to do it to the human, it’s unethical to do it to the embryo.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    Why is modification of someone's genome unethical? If you could get gene editing right now to never contract HIV that would simply be a very effective medical treatment.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  But the parents are humans and he didn’t get informed consent from them: > The scientist forged documents from an ethics review panel to recruit couples for the research
bpodgursky 5y ago
Preserving the status quo doesn't make you a hero either. HIV resistance is optional, sure. What about conceiving a child with sickle cell anemia? Why is that more ethical than trying to give a child a healthier life? We do a lot of medical treatments on children without their consent. There are now (experimental!) open-heart surgeries of children in the womb. Is that unacceptable too?
- krisoft 5y ago
  I’m not sure what you are arguing about. There is a process to decide if a medical procedure is ethical or not. It involves an ethics board where people who know much more about both ethics and the proposed procedure than the average HN commenter make a decision. If you feel this process did come up with bad decisions please elaborate. But the researcher in question didn’t bother to get a decision, just falsified one for himself. That doesn’t sound right, really.
  - quinnjh 5y ago
    In Hitler's Ethic Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. https://www.csustan.edu/history/hitlers-ethic https://www.csustan.edu/history/hitlers-ethic Further- if we use dynamical system theory and look at coastal engineering-when we apply a control (say a barrier wall or "groyne" at the beach, to retain the nice sand) mother nature with time will work around it (the sand is carried by the tide and waves to carve out of the beach and deposit on the back of the retaining wall) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-The-terminal-groyne-syndrome-occurring-in-Southwick-beach-in-West-Sussex-where-the_fig1_347353047/amp https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-The-terminal-groyne-sy... Engineering nature properly requires a liberatory embrace of differentiation, diversity, and ultimately futility. The natSoc obsession with systemic perfection and crystallization leads somewhere predictable, and we rightly stamped the movement out (though many of the doctors worked w and moved to the US, and allies have had their share of eugenic fantasies and doctrines). We need to wake up from the childlike belief in the infallibility of scientism. As Richard Feynman put it: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"