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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Dr He chose a bad time to skirt scientific ethics, regardless if there was any direct harm to the people, as China recently announced measures to punish scientific misconduct [1].

They will likely make an example of him since he's such a public figure now. Whether they can really change the culture there is to be seen, but one thing China knows how to do is add layers of administration to select areas.

Ever since CRISPR was announced people have always been scared of what "rouge" actors could be do, now that this technology it's so 'democratized'. It was probably bound to happen somewhere. So they'll be interested in clamping down hard on the early minor cases of ethical violations, in order to protect against other much more deliberately malicious future cases.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07740-z

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Re read the article. It's not about the use of CRISPR but the lack of transparency in his operation. The couple gave a consent based on false info. They thought their babies would receive a type of 'vaccination'.

This is what I thought the big issue was, that the parents were grossly misinformed and uniformed about what Dr. He was doing.

Is there any good link with sources of what the patients were actually told?

The original articles about this were pretty vague and only had the initial negative response from scientists who were against the whole thing. But I’m curious about the level of consent he got and what the AIDS organization was told when they helped him find his guinea pigs.

If he really did say it was just a vaccination then regardless of what scientists think, he crossed a line no medical professional should take.

He Jiankui did a Q&A in November, many of the questions people asked concerned the informed content process he used. The Q&A starts ~20 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLZufCrjrN0

I typed a transcript http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/human-genome-editing-summi...

> "rouge"

You mean rogue?

It's a play on "red"; the Dr is Chinese.

(For grammar-challenged people who might take dry humour as serious: above comment is clearly a joke. “Rouge” is the French word for “red”, but it’s a common misspelling for the English word “rogue”. It’s pretty clear the top post in thread is a misspelling, not a pun.)

Eh? I wasn't joking, and I've never seen "rogue" mis-spelled as "rouge".

The top post even put it in double quotes, e.g. "rouge". That makes it pretty clear it's a pun, in this case playing on rogue and red - and it works all the better because of the recent 'red danger', anti-Chinese sentiment that the powers that be are currently stirring up.

If you’ve never seen rouge as misspelling of rogue, you haven’t read enough intertubes. Beyond that, I guess we won’t know until drmix intervenes - although now he’d say “of course!” it was voluntary ;)

If I was China I would put him in an underground lab and make him work day and night

I can't find the article but there was a geneticist who said the difference between Einstein and the average human was 50-200 base pairs.

Which ever country figures that out first will rule the world. Instead of getting an Einstein or Newton or Da Vinci every several hundred years, they could have an assembly line of them.

China already collected the DNA of 2,200 geniuses to try and find correlations. The West's value of "human rights" and subjective ethics will be our doom. We are completely ignoring avenues of research because people don't like the implications of intelligence being genetic

https://singularityhub.com/2013/03/19/chinas-bgi-to-sequence...

I'm pretty sure it's about the ethics of altering humans and a fear or a resurgence of eugenics.

That aside, I'm also pretty sure someone reviewed his work and found out that his HIV-immune mutation was not done correctly, it's a bit late for me to find a link, will update later if you're interested.

Edit: Nvm, someone else posted a better answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798764

Will an army of Einsteins be impervious to atomic warfare? I mean if they have a superior grasp of physics and build the tech to intercept an ICBM then I suppose...

Who needs nukes when you can send an autonomous drone swarm to subjugate a country? Or develop an ethnic bio weapon to wipe out your enemies with no damage to infrastructure? Nukes will be seen as primitive brute force weapons in the future

You got your cause and effect backwards. The rules were only added after he did it, because he did it.

the rules were they before he did it, but not enforced (as usual). he triggered it.

Wonder given we have a rule by law country which in constitution has freedom of speech and human rights etc. Would he just too open for his effort. Or those western value one treasurers is even respect in that country.

In china, laws are "suggestion" in most cases.

No. They were announcing crackdowns and punishments well before He Jiankui announced anything. This article, for example, is from several weeks before, and records punishments initiated well before that: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07222-2

there isn't anything crispr specific, those are all about illegal data sharing of genetic information.

Why do you think that makes any difference?

Because sharing like that is done routinely, is generally accepted, and has not created a massive uproar like the CRISPR scandal did. I'm not making a moral judgement, just pointing out that this citation doesn't support the above-posted arguments since it's in a different-enough domain.

If you had posted official CRISPR rules (like the Asilomar Conference Guidelines) created by the community with some authority, that would have been better. To my knowledge, the CRISPR community didn't publish such things, just agreed, informally, to some unofficial guidelines. So it's not super-suprising to me that somebody skirted those unofficial guidelines.

> Because sharing like that is done routinely, is generally accepted, and has not created a massive uproar

It obviously is not accepted (that's the whole point of that link!), and genetic and health information sharing routinely creates controversies, ranging from insufficient diversity to worries about AI (see DeepMind & NHS). So your premises are just wrong.

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