STAT - Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine

“he is just a scientist who forged some documents to convince medical doctors to implant gene-edited embryos” – isn’t lying and fraud good reason to send someone to jail? Isn’t failing to adequately inform research participants of what they’re getting into morally wrong? The issue goes far beyond that he genetically modified an embryo – it’s that he did so while, seemingly, lying to many people involved, and misleading them about the potential health risks. That alone, even if he had been doing something totally within scientific norms (testing a new drug, for example), is reason to villainize and punish him.

---

Also in Industry News