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Examples, when ethical concerns stopped scientific advances? (mander.xyz)

submitted 13 hours ago by partner_boat_slug@mander.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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What are examples of research topics/areas where ethical concerns have held science back? Are there any? I guess "cloning humans" is such a field?

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[–] Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

So many medicines are not licensed for pregnant women, not because there are known risks, but just because conducting human trials in that population is difficult ethically.

As a result, pregnant women have access to less treatment options, and may suffer unnecessary pain and adverse health outcomes. Which is also a bad thing, ethically...

[–] partner_boat_slug@mander.xyz 1 points 12 hours ago

Yeah most replies here focus on human trials and experimentation on living things.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 8 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Altering the germ line of a human is illegal in most countries.
Not the USA, where private companies can do it, one owned by Sam Altman.

The current controvery is whether we should allow the development of new organisms that have a opposite chirality in their chemical composition. They could grow out of control with no way to stop. It's called Mirror Life.

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/potential-risks-of-mirror-life

Keep in mind, before the Trinity bomb test, a few physicists, including Enrico Fermi, believed the atomic reaction would ignite the earth's atmosphere in a chain reaction. Army said go anyway.

[–] FoxyFerengi@startrek.website 2 points 10 hours ago

Every college chemistry class I've taken (5 now) has had a professor asking why no living thing uses all d-aminos. Kinda sounds like that experiment may answer the question one way or another!

[–] L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 hours ago

Head transplant/Body transplant.

IIRC it was going to be attempted around ~10 years ago but the head being transplanted had a change of heart ~~(though I suppose he didn't want to have a change of heart would be more accurate phrasing)~~

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 13 hours ago

There was a pretty high corpus on research done based on nazi science on the effects of temperature on the human body that is forbidden to use as reference. Those reference could help scientific discoveries, but for kinda obvious reasons they can't be used. I said kinda because they were used iirc until the 70's, when people started to question the ethics of using them.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

A lot of medicines work in animal models but then fail in primates or specifically humans. There's some great veterinary drugs out there as a result.