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Comment by hatracksat | Hacker News Reader

Who cares about unintended consequences if you're the first person to study them? China gets to deal with a novel problem and will get novel rewards eventually because the west let itself get soft.

EDIT: To all the people making Nazi comparisons, we stole the atom bomb from the Nazis. Their science across multiple disciplines was on par or superior. We're smarter than them now because we /destroyed/ them. It's easy to surpass someone who's standing still. My point is that we need real strategies and plans if we don't want certain science domains to become irrelavent due to the restrictions we place on ourselves. "We beat the Nazis" isn't a real counter argument.

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Medical ethics cares? Anyone who possess humanity and ethics and morals care? Maybe you don't care, but if so, you're a very different kind of person than I am, with very different values (or a lack of values) that I don't relate to at all.

I don't think things are so black and white. In my opinion this research has so much potential to improve humanity that it's unethical NOT to do.

Actually, not so much.

The major journals (Nature and...JAMA, I think) refused to handle the paper because it was so ethically dubious. He did get some name recognition, though also not of the sort that seems like it'd help one's career.

You sound like the kind of engineer that skips code review and deploys an untested feature straight into Production.

It's not hard to review your own code. You just need to sleep on it, spend a weekend, then come back. Guarantee it'll be like someone else wrote it.

Ok Dr. Mengele

Looks as if you're receiving a decent number of downvotes (I upvoted) for expressing some truthiness mixed with too much vitriol.

>Who cares about unintended consequences if you're >the first person to study them? Everyone with a sense of ethics, morals and humanity. But that's an answer to a useless question. Are the expected costs of unintended, likely or allowed consequences less than the expected benefits? If so, then states and societies will press ahead as was done with nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, aircraft, rocketry, etc. With exploration comes understanding and sets of ethics for each were developed to guide those inventions.

>China gets to deal with a novel problem Maybe. I don't think we have 100% certainty that positive results will ever be obtained. Millions of years of evolution have not eliminated harmful mutation from reproduction: mutation has been reduced to a low enough level to allow ongoing propagation (birth defects) and survival (cancer) but is certainly not as low as (Western human-judged) ethical and moral values would like.

>China will get novel rewards eventually >because the west let itself get soft My inclination is to agree with the sentiment (if not the vitriol) of your statement but I'm wavering a bit as I learn more about the complexity and messiness. Of course, the US "pushed" ethical and moral bounds when exploring nuclear technology, chemical warfare, bio warfare, missile technologies, etc. Some of those turned out to be existential threats and loosening ethical and moral values might have been warranted by guaranteeing the existence of our society. But most of them turned out not to be existential threats but instead reasonably nice long-term economic benefits.

While I don't think every child should get-a-trophy-for-participation, I'm not sure we should loosen our ethical and moral standards to pursue genetic engineering. A legit question is: other states will pursue genetic engineering aggressively and how do we respond?

And the result is likely not binary: winning this race does not produce world domination; winning is likely a temporary (10-50 year?), slight technological advantage. Even serious existential threats, such as nuclear weapons, were leaked and duplicated by competing states. And those were rare, easily identifiable items (big atomic or nuclear bombs). Exfiltrating a key genetic engineering masterpiece can be done invisibly with a comb or razor in a checked-bag...

And being a second-mover can be a huge advantage. Just ask Japan (PHS), Africa (mobile-first/only), Hong Kong (cable internet), Chattanooga (utility internet), etc. First movers can over-invest in being the first mover and suffer when advantages of scale, learning or technology kick in. The "center" of the tech world (Silicon Valley) had the worst Internet service in the developed world; but we had the best 1970's phone and cable service on the planet.

People who aren’t sociopaths, maybe.

You are talking about two human beings. HN can be shocking for its collective lack of empathy, but this is a new low.

The genes won't care that the scientists playing with them were unethical. The only reason your attitude seems appealing is because nobody wants to believe eventually this strategy will give the Chinese a superior understanding of gene editing.

What good will a superior understanding of gene editing be if we cease being a civilized society where scientific research can be nurtured in the first place? Ethics are not optional to science, they are integral to the social foundation upon which science rests.

Ethics (e.g., scruples against fabricating research for personal gain) are actually what keeps Western science a cut above Eastern science.

Obviously, though, ethics aren't a binary concept; you can value eugenics at the expense of suffering and be committed to the quality of your research.

And good science knows no politics.

People do, though, and they're the scientists.

I get the feeling OP is saying this sarcastically, as a way to criticize China.

Yes, standing on the shoulders of giants is ok ... but behave while doing so.

Would you agree that China sees eye to eye with the West regarding other ethical concerns such as copyright, patents, organ transplants, or genocide?

The cost of ethical science is well known, and still proper democratic countries deny themselves the ignorance of human rights that is prevalent in China. Your comments read like quoted from Nazi Germany medical research in the 1940s. Welcome to the present.

true, if tech is the only goal. but I would choose to be lower tech in this case. But perhaps my choices would affect those who might come after me... (That too is both ways though).

Some might bring up all the medical advances that came out of the tortures and "studies" from Japan and Nazi Germany. Certainly many advances were made... My friend once told me that there are certain medical "study" records available that US researchers reference from WW2 in Japanese records.

The tech won't exist In a vacuum though. Suppose this eventually gives the Chinese an edge in precision medicine, your hands might be clean as far as the messy work but unless you ban citizens from visiting how are you going to regulate the health products that will emerge eventually? We can bury our heads in the sand but eventually the rising tide will get our socks wet unless we have the foresight to prepare a little.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Look again lots of people here are saying that the research can continue but must be held to not only ethical but engineering standards of the highest order. If youre willing to compromise on those to achieve strategic goals between nation states, than thats a political or moral distinction and ill let it weigh on your conscience if you create a generation of infertile children 80 years from now.

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