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Comment by 0xffff2 | Hacker News Reader

None of those seem to affect anyone else, so as long as the person experimenting on themselves is of sound mind I don't see the problem.

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Not seeming to affect anyone else seems like an insufficient condition. It should be predictably not going to affect anyone else with high reliability - and I strongly suspect this was not the case.

It can also affect people indirectly, which leads to the same reasons we have laws requiring seatbelts or motorcycle helmets.

Not everyone wants to see someone die in a horrible way and have to clean up the mess.

Exactly. As long as your experiments cannot modify the germline, knock yourself out with CRISPR self-experimentation (as long as you're comfortable with the possible consequences).

Absolutely not. It only takes one idiot to fuck up their body horrifically for the technology to get banned for all the non-idiots.

You can’t ban something I can perform in my garage (not effectively at least) with a few thousand dollars in supplies.

Sure they can. They banned explosives (which I agree with) and you can probably do that with a few hundred dollars.

Sure they’re banned but it’s not particularly hard for amateurs to manufacture after some careful reading, The situation is similar to bans on cryptography IMO.

> The situation is similar to bans on cryptography IMO.

No offense, but a misleading and inaccurate analogy. It's much closer to bans on chemical precursors of drugs like MDMA or LSD. Those chemical precursors have many legitimate uses, but since some people use them to make illegal drugs, normal citizens cannot acquire them easily, or without breaking the law.

I don't see how that's different. Again you can manufacture those precursors after careful reading (that's the fundamental idea behind organic synthesis.)

They can ban the actual effective research and use cases though.

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