First human trials of designer protein therapies stun US neuroscientists

https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/biotechnology/human-trial-chemogenetic-brain-therapy/104/web/2026/08

17•gradus_ad•1h ago

Comments

bix6•52m ago

Really tired of hearing how much better China is than us. It’s just so demoralizing like what is going on…

pudgywalsh•45m ago

If this were the US, you'd be claiming this recklessness is what happens when you fire all the oversight at the FDA.

Fortunately for China they have the luxury of killing people, pretending it never happened, and replacing them from its never-ending pipeline.

econ•35m ago

Your use of "Printing" before the edit had me wonder. Rapidly growing population under a one child policy? Comparable to India? How?

pudgywalsh•31m ago

HN readers often struggle to overlook minor effectual literary details but miss the bottom line:

China's population is sufficient that no one will notice a few scientists missing. Definitely not beyond their borders. They'll make sure of it.

If this experiment was unsuccessful we'd never know about it and everyone involved would be incinerated.

I don't think you could pull that off in India, population or not. For all their corruption I want to believe they frown on disappearing people if anything for religious reasons.

GPerson•24m ago

Don’t you think it hurts your case to exaggerate that China is going around incinerating scientists?

pudgywalsh•22m ago

Prove to me it doesn't happen.

GPerson•20m ago

Prove to me there’s no tea-cup in outer space orbiting the sun.

whozdat•7m ago

Maybe (just to start) count the girls you murdered in the school in Iran, though as I understand in your perverted world these do not count.

EA-3167•44m ago

A good way to cut through competing accounts and noise to find "where do people want to live more?" is to look at net migration flows.

cyanydeez•41m ago

So scientists are all leaving for europe and billionaires are all moving to texas and ... is this what you mean?

EA-3167•37m ago

All of the scientists! Oh my.

No I didn't mean anything quite that fanciful, I'm referring to net migration between China and the US. Are more people leaving the US for China, or are more people leaving China for the US? It's a crude measurement, but it beats online doomerism.

cyanydeez•31m ago

China is working to do this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03657-6

They are definitely getting immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China

High quality scientists leaving UK and US: https://www.nationpress.com/sciencetech/10-scientists-quit-u...

You'll need to clarify what you value about the immigration arguement.

EA-3167•26m ago

I've already been very clear, you simply seem unable or unwilling to read the word "net" in my posts. I appreciate that China is doing many exciting things and happily unlike many in both China and the US I don't see human progress as a zero sum game either. None of that changes what I said however, or the reality of net migration between China and the US.

dudisubekti•21m ago

> demoralizing

Why? China could do their own thing, and your country can do yours.

forestrywat•14m ago

The US is clearly on a path to crumbling infrastructure, waste, inefficiency, and corruption. Seeing that other countries seem to be doing some actual thinking about the future is demoralizing when you cannot get your leaders to care.

forestrywat•15m ago

We could, like, stop framing it as us vs them to start. We could also elect leaders who want progress and are willing to squeeze the 1% even a little bit to make that progress.

China is taking long term views. Transit and rail, solar energy, batteries, manufacturing and automation, science investment.

The US is thinking very short term, to benefit very few. Ignoring rail, cutting renewables, building highly speculative and unpopular data centers, and cutting funding to science and the arts.

I see the 30 year vision for infrastructure in China and I think we could do it here. We just... don't. Because we have somehow made long term investments that benefit many a political dead end so our two "teams" can argue about how the other team is evil.

virgil_disgr4ce•10m ago

China is an authoritarian regime that brutally punishes dissidents. Just throwing this out there because apparently everyone seems to have forgotten this.

forestrywat•8m ago

So is the US, to be honest.

mrtksn•10m ago

You can seek comfort by looking at some GDP numbers and compare GDP numbers and AI benchmarks with EU I guess :)

Kidding aside, it is very normal for a huge populous country to dominate once they get their shit together. Europeans mostly made peace with the fact that they no longer have empires, Turks and Brits a bit less so I guess but you will be fine. US is a great country, expect China be greater simply because of its sheer size.

Time to make peace with the fact that the exceptional situation was a phase, not an inherent result of the superiority of the people.

anon291•8m ago

I mean it's not a direct competition. America excels in many regards and China excels in many regards.

vardalab•6m ago

Yes, but we still have a leed in freedom according to the lore from our fearless leadership.

dyauspitr•2m ago

They’re going to run away with it. We have true regressives in power at this point staunchly defending fossil fuels and diminishing the main advantage the US had with attracting the best and brightest from all over the world. This was the worst possible to have MAGA take over.

superkuh•50m ago

This headline is burying the lede. My response to someone using genetically altered retroviruses to genetically engineer cells in the CNS of living humans would be stunned silence too. That's quite a risk to get past a review board.

The big question seems to be, how specific is the targeting of these designer retroviruses to the desired cell types and tissues and how is that achieved?

scheme271•41m ago

Wasn't there just a post a few days ago about how Chinese researchers ignored a bunch of ethical and safety guidelines to run some of this research and ended up killing a girl?

The article just brushes aside that incident and seems to assume that because China is doing this experimentation, it's ahead in regards to gene therapy targeting the brain.

fakedang•39m ago

The article mentions that incident and links to it too.

mjevans•37m ago

For all the theories about how covid might have been some conspiracy in China... (I'm more inclined to believe a hybrid, they didn't have a program to develop any weapons out of it, but would EASILY buy a coverup to try to hide the shame of yet another seasonal virus that turned out to be more)

What if this sort of research leads to some prion like disease that either works like a slow acting (fast to spread) neuro-toxin, or a scenario like the Children of Men movie?

Containment and risks need to be considered.

dyauspitr•4m ago

Good. Let’s get a move on on these things. If people die it’s no big deal if they volunteer for it and know the risks before they sign up for it.

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