I remember taking a cell microbiology course and reading and doing all these tests on living cells, like attaching fluorescent tags onto cytoskeletal proteins, taking antibodies from Donkeys against a certain marker in human cells and seeing if they show up on a Western Blot, or everything they do in reserach using HeLa cells (cancerous cells taken from an African-American lady in the '50s against her knowledge or consent and which we still use today despite her family saying they don’t want them to be used in research anymore) or a whole lot of shit. I remember getting the feeling that we really shouldn’t be messing with life on this deep of a scale… kinda like reading Jurassic Park. Like, the US military keeps smallpox around even though it’s supposed to be eradicated in the wild. With the power we have at our hands with gene editing, they could design some variant of smallpox that is even more communicable and also skips past immunities.
I understand that people might have legitimate ethical concerns with gene editing even if the libiest example Kurzgesagt gives is “people the west considers to be dictators might live a long time.”
I remember taking a cell microbiology course and reading and doing all these tests on living cells, like attaching fluorescent tags onto cytoskeletal proteins, taking antibodies from Donkeys against a certain marker in human cells and seeing if they show up on a Western Blot, or everything they do in reserach using HeLa cells (cancerous cells taken from an African-American lady in the '50s against her knowledge or consent and which we still use today despite her family saying they don’t want them to be used in research anymore) or a whole lot of shit. I remember getting the feeling that we really shouldn’t be messing with life on this deep of a scale… kinda like reading Jurassic Park. Like, the US military keeps smallpox around even though it’s supposed to be eradicated in the wild. With the power we have at our hands with gene editing, they could design some variant of smallpox that is even more communicable and also skips past immunities.
I understand that people might have legitimate ethical concerns with gene editing even if the libiest example Kurzgesagt gives is “people the west considers to be dictators might live a long time.”