"A Scientific Ethical Divide Between China and West"

"“The ‘red line’ in the West and in China are not too similar,” Deng Rui, a medical ethicist at Shanxi Medical University, said in a telephone interview. “Ethics are a question of culture, and that is about tradition, especially where it touches on human life.”

“Confucian thinking says that someone becomes a person after they are born. That is different from the United States or other countries with a Christian influence, where because of religion they may feel research on embryos is not O.K...

A global medical ethics body run by the World Health Organization or the United Nations should be set up to regulate scientific experimentation, Dr. Rao said.

More unpleasant scientific surprises are looming, several scientists said. “Right now, human gene editing is the main thing,” Mr. Yi said. Geneticists in China “don’t want to be guided by Western people.”

The mind-set among Chinese researchers, according to Mr. Yi: “ ‘We’re going to do it, then see what’s wrong, then fix it. But the conceptual discussion may be missing.’ ”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/science/a-scientific-ethical-divide-between-china-and-west.html

There is definitely a thing where America implicitly assumes that its politics/morals/ethics (tbh, not sure how to parse those out) should guide what the rest of the world is allowed to do. We have to engage honestly with what it is that humans want, not what it is that doesn't make the average American queasy.

Related (and more of my thoughts on the gene editing issue): MIT CRISPR article