(yes, this is a real post by someone who also happened to have actually been arrested for gene editing embryos)
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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If he got incredibly lucky, they're immune to AIDS. It's much more likely that they're not and will develop symptoms of new and exciting genetic disorders never seen before.
The biggest problem was that the technique used is really unreliable, so you'd expect off-target edits to be more common than on-target ones for a human-sized genome. For bacteria, you can get around it by letting the modified bacteria reproduce for a few generations, then testing most of them. If they're all good, then it worked, and if any aren't, you need to make a new batch. Testing DNA destroys the cells you're testing, so if you test enough cells in a human embryo to be sure that the edits worked, it dies. You can't just start when the embryo is a single cell to ensure that the whole thing's been edited in the same way as you need to test something pre-edit to be able to detect off-target edits.
I feel like we're ignoring the obvious solution here. Stick the kids with an AIDS needle and see what happens! /s
That tests the AIDS immunity, but not whether there are off-target edits. IIRC, the mothers were all HIV-positive, so the children are all pretty likely to be exposed anyway, which was part of how he justified the experiment to himself.
the fathers were HIV-positive, not the mothers.
that (besides the obvious ethical concerns) was a big reason behind the backlash from the genome editing community. we had already known a much less invasive method for preventing HIV infection of the embryo in this case, by 'washing' the seminal fluid away from sperm (sperm cannot become infected with HIV, but the HIV particles would be in the fluid surrounding the sperm).
I might be wrong here, but iirc the virus doesn't automatically pass on to the embryo and HIV doesn't always "take" either. Even a blood transfusion has a limited chance of infection, like 30% or so IIRC
They are not immune to HIV. They lack the receptor for HIV. Many people lack this receptor naturally.
People without the receptor that HIV targets are immune to HIV because of that, like how a rock is immune to verbal abuse or double foot amputees are immune to ingrown toenails. The immune system being able to kill something isn't the only way things can be immune to other things.
Immune here means you have an immune response. I'm pretty sure the word here is "carrier" because unless your body is actively destroying it, the virus is hitching a ride.
How about we operate at high school biology levels of understanding?
As for whether the virus will be eliminated, it depends on the health of the immune system and the person.
OED:
Merriam Webster
So unless you pretend that MW's 2b sense is the only valid one, the immunity is immunity.
If you have a sample of HIV at 37°C in blood, but with all the immune cells removed, it'll still all become inert after around a week simply due to chemical reactions with other components of blood etc.. It's pretty comparable to a population of animals - if you take away their ability to reproduce, they'll die of old age when left for long enough even if you're not actively killing them.
Edit: fat-fingered the save button while previewing the formatting
Context is how you determine definitions. This is not hard. We're not talking about legal immunity here.
And the context was a sentence that was correct if you used OED sense 1, or MW sense 1, but you decided to parse it as MW sense 2b and then complain that the sentence was incorrect.
Isn't it more like how a rock is immune to being puked on?
It's still covered in vomit and can make other people sick, it just can't get sick from it.
When a normal person is exposed to HIV, it reproduces inside of them, so can then go on to expose more people, and if there's enough of it, infect them in turn (if there's a smaller amount, their immune system will normally be able to clean it up before it gets enough of a foothold). If someone's lacking the receptor, then no matter how much they were exposed to, their immune system will eventually manage to remove it all without becoming infected because it can't reproduce. If they had a ludicrously large viral load, then there's a possibility that it could be passed on before it was destroyed, but most of the ways people get exposed to HIV aren't enough to infect someone who's vulnerable, let alone infect someone else via secondary exposure if there's not been time for the infection to grow.
You do not understand what immunity is. you are using it as a metaphor.
Even if you ignore that there's an entirely valid sense of the word immune that has nothing do do with biology (i.e. the one in phrases like diplomatic immunity), my original comment is entirely consistent with the dictionary definition of the biological sense of the word. There are probably sub-fields of biology where immunity is used as jargon for something much more specific than the dictionary definition, but this is lemmyshitpost, not a peer-reviewed domain-specific publication.