I read the news from AP and totally angry. It is a shaming day for all Chinese biomedical science researchers. CRISPR is still a premature technology to edit cell genes. HE Jiankui needs to pay the price for what he did, I don’t want to see he escaped from sanctions of the law!

It is a pure business show, men in the project had HIV but women did not, there are simple ways to keep men from infecting offspring that do not involve altering genes. The only purpose I can see is that HE and his team want to test editing, some wealthy (with HIV) will buy his work to help them edit disease genes for their offspring in the future. HE cheated to get the experiment ethical permit from the government. The painful costs was paid by the participants, twin girls, all Chinese biomedical science researchers, and China, but guess who will get the benefit?

After take a look at his gene edit result ¹, I strongly think he needs to spend the rest of his life in prison. One copy of CCR5 was not knocked out, no function loss for this baby in CCR5, except the unknown potential risk of off-target. This baby still was born, she may be the control group in this experiment. I feel so sad about that.

Updated 2019.12.30

Finally, he goes to jail ².

Source

I want to write something about Elon’s companies for a long time. In 2020, I finally find some time to write my think of his bussiness. SpaceX successfully launched a new batch of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit today (April 22, 2020) and nailed a rocket landing at sea to cap the mission.

Could we go to the Mars by 2024?

The answer is no. According to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world needs more time to recover from the disease, we need time to develop useful vaccines to make sure our human being will still stand on the earth. To the mars is like to the moon, but what we want more is to build a base on the mars. I know NASA start its plan to return the moon and build a base in last year.

Although Musk has a big Aerospace company, he still needs more time and effort to make the trip come true.

The health and food problem will always with humans wherever we are. He needs to solve the problems to copy the minimal living system from earth to mars. He couldn’t do all the things without the help from biomedical scientists like me ;)

Will we build on-ground city/base on Mars?

I am not sure if the geographical environments of Mars are good enough to build a city, but I know musk try to build the tunnel to connect big cities in US. It is a boring thing on earth. But might be a good idea to build tunnels or underground cites on Mars if there are not so many “marsquake”. The underground city may better that on-ground city, if the environments are not as good as on earth. But we all know there is no extreme weather on Mars except freeze temperature and thin air, the on-ground city is always the cheapest choice for us.

Farther away from the sun, more energy you need

Musk owns an electric vehicle company – Tesla, and a subsidiary of Tesla – SolarCity. It is always a great idea for using solar energy instead of oil. But consider the oil price, we may still using oil as major energy for a long time. How about mars? The temperature is so cold which means battery may not work under this condition, but Solar panels could. I think SolarCity maybe more meaningful than the Tesla for the purpose of Ad Astra.

OpenAI and Neuralink

There is little information about these two companies. I have a deep concern about AI, will the true world be replaced by AI robot, will we transplant some micro-chip in heads? The artificial intelligence could create more cheating illusions, to figure out which is true which isn’t would be more and more difficult. It will cause conflict between countries.

Happy Chinese new year!

Best wishes to all my friends in the new year (year of dog, 2018)

The new year will coming in few hours. 2018 will become very important year for me. I became more mature and responsible in the end of 2017. In 2018, I need to decide if I could move to some place to continue my research career or give up it, and find another kind of job (to become a programmer or data scientist again).

I want to focus on few of research fields and study deeply. My personal goal for the coming year is to finish all my previous unfinished personal projects, such as write learn R plot guide, learn more about javascript, write some thing about statistical test (I feel some of my scientist friends don’t know why and how to do hypothesis test). I will keep writing posts on my English blog.

In 2017, my colleague and I didn’t finish reading 1984, I also didn’t have enough time to learn Portuguese, I feel my English speaking and grammar even worse than before lol… But all these things will be better in the coming new year.

I’m switching my blog title from biology to biomedical science.

TBC.