Dec 17, 2018 06:41 PM
https://www.wired.com/story/how-do-you-p...c-villain/
EXCERPT: . . . He Jiankui revealed that for the last two years he has been working in secret to produce the world’s first Crispr-edited babies. Scientists denounced the work with near-unanimous condemnation, citing its technical failures as well as its deep breaches of ethical (and possibly legal) lines. What’s much less certain is what should happen to the work, now that it’s been done.
[...] During the Hong Kong summit, an audience member asked He if he would be willing to post his work to a public forum, such as the biology preprint server bioRxiv, so the scientific community could have access to the data. He said that the journal considering his manuscript had advised against posting anything to bioRxiv until the paper had passed peer review. [...] But scientists who have seen the manuscript doubt it will pass peer review any time soon, if ever. “It was a very shoddy paper, very incomplete. What I saw wouldn’t pass any journal,” says Eric Topol [...] who reviewed He’s manuscript for the Associated Press. Other scientists have also denounced the experiment as a technical failure, based on the slides He presented in Hong Kong.
[...] Science with a small “s” is a human enterprise as old as humanity itself. Nibbling on that tasty-looking mushroom and waiting a few hours to see if you get sick? That’s hypothesis testing. Try it a few more times with successively bigger bites, maybe add a bit of open-fire cooking; you’ve got a scientific method going. He’s human experiment is clearly science in this sense.
Whether it will become Science with a big “S” remains to be seen. This more rigorous meaning of Science—which seeks to accrue knowledge by progressively, and systematically, reducing uncertainty—has only been around a few hundred years. Its arrival was marked by the development of the scientific paper, published in the pages of peer-reviewed journals. Before the 1600s, scientists communicated over private correspondence or in lectures. The scientific paper then became, and still is, the enabling unit of Science as a progressive, global enterprise.
So what then, is to be done with the work of researchers like He, who step outside the bounds of acceptable Science? It’s a question that has mostly only come up in a backward-looking way, to studies that might have met the ethical standards of the day but have since been roundly denounced. The Tuskegee study—which denied African-American men syphilis treatment—comes to mind, as does Operation Sea-Spray, the US Navy’s fatal release of pathogenic bacteria over San Francisco.
Then you have the case of Edward Jenner, who in the 1790s began experimenting on people with cowpox, injecting them with material taken from diseased dairy cows to see if it would protect them against smallpox. The Royal Society rejected his paper on the topic. Feeling it was an important public health contribution, Jenner published his case studies privately. The account led to the formation of mass vaccination campaigns and the eventual eradication of smallpox from the face of the Earth.
He’s few public statements have hinted at his ambitions to be a modern-day Jenner, ambitions that may have blinded him to his transgressions. Now the scientific establishment will have to decide if it too will wear blinders. Never before has the academic publishing world had to contend in real time with research that nearly everyone agrees was profoundly wrong. And if anything, the last two weeks have made it all too clear just how unprepared anyone is to do that....
MORE: https://www.wired.com/story/how-do-you-p...c-villain/
EXCERPT: . . . He Jiankui revealed that for the last two years he has been working in secret to produce the world’s first Crispr-edited babies. Scientists denounced the work with near-unanimous condemnation, citing its technical failures as well as its deep breaches of ethical (and possibly legal) lines. What’s much less certain is what should happen to the work, now that it’s been done.
[...] During the Hong Kong summit, an audience member asked He if he would be willing to post his work to a public forum, such as the biology preprint server bioRxiv, so the scientific community could have access to the data. He said that the journal considering his manuscript had advised against posting anything to bioRxiv until the paper had passed peer review. [...] But scientists who have seen the manuscript doubt it will pass peer review any time soon, if ever. “It was a very shoddy paper, very incomplete. What I saw wouldn’t pass any journal,” says Eric Topol [...] who reviewed He’s manuscript for the Associated Press. Other scientists have also denounced the experiment as a technical failure, based on the slides He presented in Hong Kong.
[...] Science with a small “s” is a human enterprise as old as humanity itself. Nibbling on that tasty-looking mushroom and waiting a few hours to see if you get sick? That’s hypothesis testing. Try it a few more times with successively bigger bites, maybe add a bit of open-fire cooking; you’ve got a scientific method going. He’s human experiment is clearly science in this sense.
Whether it will become Science with a big “S” remains to be seen. This more rigorous meaning of Science—which seeks to accrue knowledge by progressively, and systematically, reducing uncertainty—has only been around a few hundred years. Its arrival was marked by the development of the scientific paper, published in the pages of peer-reviewed journals. Before the 1600s, scientists communicated over private correspondence or in lectures. The scientific paper then became, and still is, the enabling unit of Science as a progressive, global enterprise.
So what then, is to be done with the work of researchers like He, who step outside the bounds of acceptable Science? It’s a question that has mostly only come up in a backward-looking way, to studies that might have met the ethical standards of the day but have since been roundly denounced. The Tuskegee study—which denied African-American men syphilis treatment—comes to mind, as does Operation Sea-Spray, the US Navy’s fatal release of pathogenic bacteria over San Francisco.
Then you have the case of Edward Jenner, who in the 1790s began experimenting on people with cowpox, injecting them with material taken from diseased dairy cows to see if it would protect them against smallpox. The Royal Society rejected his paper on the topic. Feeling it was an important public health contribution, Jenner published his case studies privately. The account led to the formation of mass vaccination campaigns and the eventual eradication of smallpox from the face of the Earth.
He’s few public statements have hinted at his ambitions to be a modern-day Jenner, ambitions that may have blinded him to his transgressions. Now the scientific establishment will have to decide if it too will wear blinders. Never before has the academic publishing world had to contend in real time with research that nearly everyone agrees was profoundly wrong. And if anything, the last two weeks have made it all too clear just how unprepared anyone is to do that....
MORE: https://www.wired.com/story/how-do-you-p...c-villain/