Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers into your own copy.

Last lesson you asked what you owe for knowledge you already have. Today the question goes one step further back: is there knowledge that nobody should go looking for in the first place?

🔬 1. Should we find out?

Five questions somebody could research. For each one, decide whether it should be researched: yes, no, or only if… (and say what the condition is).

✍️ Write here, on your own, before anyone speaks.

Could we find out…	Yes, no, or only if…	Why?
1. whether students at this school would get better results with no homework at all?
2. exactly how long a human being can go without sleep before lasting damage is done?
3. whether a particular gene makes people more likely to be violent?
4. what you are like as a person, using only what your phone knows about you?
5. whether a human embryo's genes can be edited so that the child is born protected from a disease?

✍️ Write here, on your own. Look at the ones you hesitated over. Each time, was the problem…

the method: how you would have to find out,
the content: the knowledge itself, once it existed, or
the use: what somebody might do with it afterwards?

Say which, for at least two of the five.

🧬 2. Knowledge that should not have been sought

In November 2018 a Chinese biophysicist, He Jiankui, announced that he had used the gene-editing tool CRISPR on human embryos, and that twin girls had been born from them. He said he had edited a gene called CCR5, which HIV uses to enter cells, with the aim of protecting the girls from HIV. The girls are known only by the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana.

The reaction was immediate. Three days after the announcement, the Chinese authorities suspended all his research. In December 2019 a court in Shenzhen sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine of three million yuan. The court found that three gene-edited babies had been born, not two. Research published after the announcement suggested that the edit may not even have worked as intended, and that the changes could do the children more harm than good. He was released in April 2022.

Merrit Kennedy, "Chinese Researcher Who Created Gene-Edited Babies Sentenced to 3 Years in Prison," NPR, 30 December 2019.

Almost nobody in science defended what he did. But notice what they condemned.

✍️ Write here, on your own.