I think that Jankui went through with the experiment because he felt that the success of preventing the children from obtaining a currently incurable disease outweighed the potential consequences. He might have someone close to him who is suffering from that particular disease and wanted to stop that from happening to someone else since he had the power to do so. I think it is going to be really hard to make any type of gene-editing ethical because how can you justify your reasoning for deciding which types of gene-editing are ethical or unethical. In my opinion, since gene-editing is deemed unethical, he should be punished according to what laws are already in place. However, if his endeavor was successful, I think it should be taken into consideration in future discussions on whether it is ethical to edit genes.
In the
Nevirapine trials in Uganda, the trial administrators did not get consent from
the participants regarding changes in the experiment and were dosed wrongly.
The administrators failed to report 14 deaths and the thousands of side effects
and reactions to the drug were not reported as well. This unethical study is
different from the gene-editing study because a multitude of people died from
the trial and things were covered up. Jankui did not cover up anything because
he technically was not in the wrong. He told the world about his work and his
work did not result in any fatalities.
I think that this story
might have a negative effect on the public’s opinion of medicine since every
person in medicine had a negative perception of Jankui’s study. If it were me
and I heard that people were running unethical studies on humans and not told
of the possible good side of the study, I would gain a negative perception as
well.
Fernandez, R., & Gijsbertsen, R. (2016, June 30). Examples of unethical trials. Retrieved from https://www.somo.nl/examples-of-unethical-trials/