Recent events highlight an unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping

THE ANNOUNCEMENTDNA in November of the editing of the genomes of two embryos that are now baby girls, by He Jiankui, a Chinese -sequencing expert—brought much righteous, and rightful, condemnation. But it also brought a lot of tut-tutting from the outside world about how this sort of thing was to be expected in a place like China, where regulations, whatever they may say on paper, are laxly enforced. Dig deeper, though, and what happened starts to look more intriguing than just the story of a lone maverick having gone off the rails in a place with lax regulation. It may instead be an example of a phenomenon called ethics dumping.Ethics dumping is the carrying out by researchers from one country (usually rich, and with strict regulations) in another (usually less well off, and with laxer laws) of an experiment that would not be permitted at home, or of one that might be permitted, but in a way that would be frowned on. The most worrisome cases involve medical research, in which health, and possibly lives, are at stake. But other investigations—anthropological ones, for example—may also be carried out in a more cavalier fashion abroad. As science becomes more international the risk of ethics dumping, both intentional and unintentional, has risen. The suggestion in this case is that Dr He was encouraged and assisted in his project by a researcher at an American university.