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Comment by diffeomorphism | Hacker News Reader

Is that at all obvious? Suppose there are serious side effects and the scientist loses his arm. You bet that people will say it was unethical by the lab provider to let them try.

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I mean, there's plenty of recreational activities where the participant has a pretty good chance of losing their arm or worse. Nobody seems to argue about the legality, let alone the ethics of BASE jumping, wingsuiting, free solo climbing, or technical diving.

And unlike scientific experimentation, these don't even come with any sort of broader social benefit. We let consenting adults mix wildly speculative breathing gasses so they can dive 500 feet underwater. Pretty much for no other reason than it's cool. Why not let scientists do the same if it might cure a pandemic that's killed millions?

free solo climbing in the office building?

The point is that the university is providing equipment and allows this to take place in their labs.

One view of this is that the question ought to be whether or not those people are right in assigning blame to anyone. If the scientist is fully aware of the risk and willing to use himself as a test subject, it's hard to argue that there is any blame to go around.

But what if the scientist feels pressured to provide results and cuts corners to get those results. That may be something intagible but still have an effect on the decisions he/she makes. It would be next to impossible to prove that and in term protect the person, so the only way would be to outright ban such tests.

But what if all scientists feel pressured to do the same, in an effort to win relevance?

.... what if .... entire nations feel pressured to do the same, not wait for trials, just proclaim victory on a hunch... like Russia?

> .... what if .... entire nations feel pressured to do the same, not wait for trials, just proclaim victory on a hunch... like Russia?

Funny for you to say that right now...

https://nypost.com/2020/08/31/fda-willing-to-fast-track-covi...

But it does make perfect sense -- if at some point a certain category was shown to have a very high projected morbidity rate -- say the overweight elderly with diabetes -- you could approve the medicine just for that group if it was deemed better than just letting those people die.

Just like you give amphetamine salts to people with ADHD and not to the general population -- because the benefits outweigh the risks for that particular population.

But scientists are not in that category. I don't event want to get into the legalities of self-administering a vaccine not yet marketed -- shouldn't you pay an astronomical price for it?

Sort of like how spinraza costs 2$ million because there are so few patients and you have to split the development cost among them, if you self-administer a vaccine before mass marketing, perhaps you should pay the development costs out of your own pocket?

I'm not really criticizing the policy, mostly because there is no policy there to criticize. There was a political outcry accusing the US government of bottlenecking treatments, so an agency makes a public statement saying they are willing to take risks.

The actual content of the statement has nothing actionable in it, so it can never be an issue. The fact that the agency is reacting to some plain-Earth level nut outcry is an issue.

And, yeah, of course, nothing really happened there, at least yet. Nothing did happen on Russia either, again, at least yet. It all just makes for a funny comment with really interesting timing.

In a vacuum perhaps. But in real life, the scientist ends up making insurance claims when the self-administered vaccine goes wrong.

in the US, this would be insurance that the scientist (and/or their emloyer) pays for. if enough scientists perform risky experiments that it meaningfully increases payouts, I'm sure the insurer could figure out a way to account for that in the premiums.

in short: who cares?

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