[DIYbio] Re: The Dr. He Jiankui Crispr Scandal

Yeah, let's keep a more level head about this please. Some of the problems mentioned in the OP seem like serious issues, but others seem more like once people got whipped into an outrage, they started latching on to every ambiguity and presenting it as another atrocity. This guy is representative only for his own beliefs and approaches, and even if he missed some obvious safety/methodological issues, on the grand scale of human misdeeds, a less-than-rigorously executed medical experiment with the rather laudable intent of solving AIDS that might plausibly cause future side-effects of unknown seriousness in two human beings doesn't deserve global outrage. If I take everything about his work as presented to us by his critics at face value (which is dubious opinion-forming policy at the best of times), then this guy needs a serious talking to about professional responsibility from a senior in his field and perhaps to be ready to apologize or pay damages if the kids turn out negatively affected. He doesn't deserve the demonizing these news articles are putting on him, and painting this clear outlier as somehow representative of bioscience at large and then extrapolating that even further to "Small groups of researchers can make virtually unilateral decisions about experiments that have potentially global consequences, and that everyone else only learns about after the fact" is just blatant fearmongering.