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The person is blind. The upside is dramatic. People have surgery all the time for significantly less upside.
by danielmarkbruce 2y ago
The person is blind. The upside is dramatic.
People have surgery all the time for significantly less upside.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoCan you call it an upside if it has ~no chance of working?
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoA team who works in the space thinks it's sufficiently likely they are going to spend time working on it. These aren't a pack of losers off the street - these people have real options in life to do all kinds of interesting work. There is no chance it has no chance.
- yencabulator 2y agoBut they've never demonstrated the operation working on an animal...
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoso what? "that's the way it's usually done" ?
- yencabulator 2y agoYes, for many reasons. What else were you expecting? It tends to be more a cost-effective way of using the research money, it's considered more ethical, it has less legal risk, and so on. If you're saying you want to perform a full-head transplant on humans without ever succeeding on apes, people would very rightly call you delusional.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoHow about think instead. The amount of precaution required is a function of the risk and reward. That's a stupid analogy. The downside would be death.
- vkou 2y agoThe upside in this case is zero. There are compassionate treatment exemptions for research procedures, but they need to have a snowball's chance in hell of working. It's nice that the people behind this think that this meets that bar, but I'll believe it when independent experts in the field can vouch for the procedure having a reasonable chance of working. If they do, great, go for it. If they don't, no amount of rabble-rousing of the uninformed (people like me) should permit them to operate on humans.