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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

It still makes a difference for this kind of experiment. There is a difference between experiments and studies on consenting adults and on children, the bar is higher when you are experimenting on children. And it is much clearer that certain types of experiments are unethical when you perform them on children while on consenting adults you could make an argument that the adults do understand the risk and consent.

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The children also don’t consent to having inferior genetics that could have been fixed. The argument is purely symmetrical.

The arguments look very different if they had tried to cure a severe genetic disease. The risk/benefit calculation would be entirely different compared to the stunt that was actually performed.

My point is that in cases where consent is impossible like for unborn children, the bar is much higher on what kind of experiment could be considered ethical. There must be a clear potential benefit for the child and an acceptable risk compared to that benefit. This experiment fails on both.

Their "stunt" was when they attempted to make the child immune to HIV because both parents had HIV. Did the children consent to be passed HIV from their mother?

On the one hand we have very well validated methods of preventing transmission of HIV from mother to child, on the other we have an experimental gene modification technique attempting to use a blunt instrument to modify a gene that may reduce the chance of contracting HIV. Yes, the stunt was unnecessary, likely ineffective, and incredibly unethical.

(wiki at least also disagrees with you and said the mothers were HIV negative, so plain old in vitro fertilization would have been all that was actually needed)

Every day, we run experiments on hundreds of thousands of future babies - we mash sperms and eggs together and they mix up in wildly unpredictable ways. Plus countless random mutations. This process already has an uncomfortably high defect rate.

Then the issue is really risk, not consent.

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