Quotes from people in the field now that more information was divulged:
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′ “It’s even more appalling and abhorrent now,” Liu, cofounder of the genome editing company Beam Therapeutics, told STAT. “His responses displayed a deeply disturbing naivete about the issues involved. I have a deep fear that this could set back the field [of therapeutic genome editing] so badly that patients won’t get the therapies they desperately need.”
Other experts in the audience were equally critical. “Having listened to Dr. He, I can only conclude that this was misguided, premature, unnecessary, and largely useless,” said bioethicist Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, a member of the summit organizing committee. ′
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′ I would add “criminal” to that list myself, because it does appear that the consent forms that the parents signed told them that this was an HIV vaccine research project. It appears that Dr. He was the only person to explain the experiment and the consent form to the patients, and God only knows what he told them or what they understood of the work itself. By American legal standards, he has (I’d say) exhibited depraved indifference to human life, and in a better world he’d stand trial for it.
It’s hard to see how this could have been done much worse. It’s obvious that human embryonic gene editing is not ready for use yet, and this is not the work of some brave pioneer because we already knew that. Going ahead with this experiment was reckless, dangerous, counterproductive, and arrogant beyond belief.′
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′ We work with worms and zebrafish to generate precise point mutations. The amount of screening required to find a precise edit among the mix of indels and complex rearrangements/insertions makes me shudder at the thought of attempting this so brazenly in patients. ′
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‘The technology is immature, this was an inappropriate modification, AND HE DID IT INCOMPETENTLY. I have no words. ’
I did not know what to expect, but I am not surprised.
I am now interested in how this plays out from an alignment perspective. It seems to me that the ethics of genetic editing have been taken pretty seriously by practitioners, and I’m tempted to make an analogy between the ethics here and safety in AI.
Quotes from people in the field now that more information was divulged:
------
′ “It’s even more appalling and abhorrent now,” Liu, cofounder of the genome editing company Beam Therapeutics, told STAT. “His responses displayed a deeply disturbing naivete about the issues involved. I have a deep fear that this could set back the field [of therapeutic genome editing] so badly that patients won’t get the therapies they desperately need.”
Other experts in the audience were equally critical. “Having listened to Dr. He, I can only conclude that this was misguided, premature, unnecessary, and largely useless,” said bioethicist Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, a member of the summit organizing committee. ′
------
′ I would add “criminal” to that list myself, because it does appear that the consent forms that the parents signed told them that this was an HIV vaccine research project. It appears that Dr. He was the only person to explain the experiment and the consent form to the patients, and God only knows what he told them or what they understood of the work itself. By American legal standards, he has (I’d say) exhibited depraved indifference to human life, and in a better world he’d stand trial for it.
It’s hard to see how this could have been done much worse. It’s obvious that human embryonic gene editing is not ready for use yet, and this is not the work of some brave pioneer because we already knew that. Going ahead with this experiment was reckless, dangerous, counterproductive, and arrogant beyond belief.′
-------
′ We work with worms and zebrafish to generate precise point mutations. The amount of screening required to find a precise edit among the mix of indels and complex rearrangements/insertions makes me shudder at the thought of attempting this so brazenly in patients. ′
--------
‘The technology is immature, this was an inappropriate modification, AND HE DID IT INCOMPETENTLY. I have no words. ’
I did not know what to expect, but I am not surprised.
I am now interested in how this plays out from an alignment perspective. It seems to me that the ethics of genetic editing have been taken pretty seriously by practitioners, and I’m tempted to make an analogy between the ethics here and safety in AI.
I really hope those kids are okay.