There's a lot of disturbing things going on in China at the moment ....
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| Hybrid Soldiers - Not Quite What Was Expected. |
..... from its territorial grabs in the South China sea, and threats to anyone who resists, to its spying and interference in the democratic process in many Western countries.
But this little news snippet probably should have been given more attention in the West than it apparently did.
In March 2023, the Chinese language journal Military Medical Sciences published a worrying science paper from researchers at the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, in which they described an experiment in which they had edited human embryonic stem cells. Nothing too unusual about that, as although we have rules about this sort of thing, it is done under supervision in the rest of the world as well.
However, when you look at who employs the researchers, they are obviously employed to help out the Chinese military. So what was it that they did? Well according to the published paper, they used a common gene editing tool to insert a gene from Tardigrades (very very tough, but tiny, invertebrates) into the human embryonic stem cells.
They then experimented on the resultant cells, and found that they gave the human embryonic stem cells increased resistance to radiation. They concluded that this could one day lead to the creation of 'super-soldiers' (presumably Chinese), who could better survive and operate in nuclear fallout landscapes. They didn't ponder whether these 'super-soldiers' would be wholly human or not .... but insisted that this line of experimentation was both "totally legal" and wholly "ethical" .... well maybe, in a communist dictatorship, but probably not in many other countries.
The ethical implications of the Chinese being prepared to carry out this kind of experiment are disturbing enough .... but if this is OK to them, what else is, where are their boundaries?
We are facing a far more dangerous future threat from the current Chinese state in the second cold war, than that which existed with the old USSR in the first cold war.
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