BI215-A: Principles of Genetics

This reminds me slightly of a previous forum post in which we discussed designer babies. Except I would argue that a huge difference in the two is that this case is considered pretty unethical. My first question was what adults/parents would willingly participate in this, but that is beside the point. I think that for him to go through with it knowing it is unethical shows poor judgment on his part for sure, but while reading about it I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and consider reasons he might have had for continuing with this study despite how unethical it is. It is clearly a subject that he is very passionate about, but there are other ways to prevent HIV that do not involve genetic altering. I do think the fact that he ultimately wanted to protect the babies from infection later in life shows that he isn’t completely a bad person, but I do think he needs to face consequences for this. In comparing this to the experiments done by Nazi doctors, there are some key differences. While what Jankui did was unethical, he did state that he wanted to protect the twins from infection later in life. In contrast, the Nazi doctors carried out experiments with no regard for the wellbeing of their patients, and in quite cruel ways. The patients the Nazi doctors did experiments on were alive and suffered greatly, even dying some of the time. Jankui did his experiments on embryos. I think that the effect this might have on public opinion of medicine and science is that people may be hesitant to consider genome editing in babies in the future, even when it could potentially be used in a good, ethical way. People also could lose trust in doctors as a result of this.