You need better friends. A true bro would allow you to suck poop out of his sphincter.
I know, right?
Iâm pretty sure this thread has metaâd itself. âWhat could possibly go wrong in a forum thread?â We could have a few respected members get into a Internet back-and-forth no-one-can-win-this argument for a few pages, then start talking about trading poop via turkey baster!
Why do you hate scientific progress? You some kind of poop communist?
We need to seize the means of poop production.
But what about those of you who donât eat lettuce? Certainly that will impact national productivity.
This romaine sickness outbreak was at a horrible time really.
Carpe anus!
I did that years ago. Itâs why I have to eat lettuce.
I wasnât aware of this case so looked it up.
In the 1990s scientists such as himself, he explains, were too caught up in the promise of gene therapy to realize that they did not know enough about it to warrant human testing. âWe were drawn into the simplicity of the concept. You just put the gene in,â Wilson says.
The trial he conducted tested the safety of a therapy for ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency, a rare disorder in which the liver lacks a functional copy of the OTC gene. The defect prevents the body from eliminating ammonia, a toxic breakdown product of protein metabolism. The Penn scientists had engineered a weakened adenovirus, or cold virus, to deliver a normal copy of the OTC gene into the liver.
And CRISPR has made it easy to play with genes. Fortunately the recent blow-back indicates that most of the medical community realizes that we donât know enough for human genetic editing.
Ironically OTC deficiency sounds like a good candidate for prevention via genetic editing: itâs caused by genetic defects in the X chromosome. Genetic testing of potential parents could detect risk for the disease and then children could be conceived using IVF with genetically engineered cells.
âŚwe now know that one of the twins also has some cells where one copy of the gene wasnât edited at all , meaning this twin has thus taken on the risks of gene editing without the supposed benefit of HIV protection.
Iâll summarize another fact. He was only able to test 80-90% of the genome to make sure it hadnât thrown those changes around other areas outside of CCR5. Because of the mosaic nature of embryonic cells, this âsamplingâ is not remotely close to the 80-90% of claimed (something he conveniently left out). Not even sure if he only did genomic (as in only actual genes) or full chromosomal sequencing. If he only did genomic, he conveniently left out 99% of the DNA including important sequences like transcription regulatory regions.
Something else to ponder:
He managed to perfectly time the birth of these kids for paper submission and presentation at this huge conference, just 5 miles from his work. Science doesnât work around conference schedules.
University of Wisconsin bioethicist Alta Charo said, âHaving listened to Dr. He, I can only conclude that this was misguided, premature, unnecessary, and largely useless.â
There are two separate issues here, the benefits of the intervention and the risks.
You are addressing the benefits. Itâs true that we donât know the benefits yet, but thatâs minor. Itâs hard to test embryos, they are relatively fragile. As the girls grow up, they will doubtlessly undergo lots more testing to determine whether or not the intervention was effective, i.e. whether they actually acquired some degree of resistance to HIV. Even if not every cell is edited, they may have some partial resistance. And even if there is no benefit, thatâs often the outcome of clinical trials. Participants in clinical trials are often reminded that they may not personally benefit from the trial. It is the future patients that will benefit.
The greater concern is the risks of the intervention. This is what has other scientists up in arms. Itâs acceptable if patients are not better off after a clinical trial, but itâs unacceptable if they are worse off. Unlike most clinical trials, here the risks are very hard to adequately assess until itâs too late. And the risks may well affect the descendants of the two girls.
The kids were born late October or early November. Thatâs not hard to arrange at all, just wait until January to start the project.
I mean weâve all seen the gif where the girl uses a grinder and sends the sparks between her legs. Right?
Guys?
Actually, yes. I was thinking about that when I wrote what I did.
Thatâs what I meant. He skipped all kinds of scientific/ethical protocols to make sure the embryos were embedded in Jan/Feb just so his âexperimentsâ could be ready for this convention.
My guess is the next Human Genome Project will be to simulate ârunningâ the genetic code, rather than simply decoding it.
At some point weâre going to have a virtual living thing in a supercomputer. Maybe not âconsciousâ or whatever, but every molecule in every cell simulated and being run in real time simultaneously. Once we can ârunâ the code, we can learn how to edit âin real timeâ rather than at conception/seed.
I donât see anything to suggest he rushed the project.
If he skipped an internal review, it was because he knew the project would be blocked, not because he needed more time.
Nor do I think he âskippedâ any preimplantation experiments in order to start in January. If his data are limited, itâs because there is a limited number of embryonic cells you can sacrifice without risking viability of the embryo itself. More time wouldnât have mattered. If you look at the session transcript, youâll see that nobody complained about missing data.
Finally, delivering the children before the convention doesnât even matter that much. His talk was about performing an embryonic intervention, not showing off baby pictures. He could have given pretty much the same talk, and ignited just as much controversy, if the babies were due next January.
I think the lack of longer term animal studies suggests he rushed the project, but we might just disagree on that one :)
It suggests an unethical study, not an unscientific or otherwise botched study.
In other words, if as a society we made the moral decision to ignore human rights, then from a scientific perspective this study wouldnât raise any eyebrows.
Agreed. Iâm not very good at splitting my narratives as I was not trying to say it was unscientific. Botched? Failure is a part of science and is just as important as success. However, if this was all about science, then the need for human participation here was zero. He could have used monkeys and SIV to prove the method would work in humans too. For humans there is a path to get here, he just didnât want take it because of red tape and time. And this is the time I keep referring to.
In warehouse automation newsâŚ
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Personally, Iâd rather just stay away from the bears in the first place and not need the bear repellent spray at all.