Nonconsenting prisoners are the source of many organ transplantations in China | Hacker News Reader

Nonconsenting prisoners are the source of many organ transplantations in China

jtcvs.org

57 pointsqrush32 comments

For anybody who thinks that prisoners perhaps deserve to have their organs harvested (a comment to that effect popped up and then promptly disappeared here), there are at least two things worth considering:

1. As is clearly stated in the article, this includes political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, such as (but not at all limited to) Falun Gong.

2. Even if the state had the best of intentions (and it clearly doesn't), this creates a very perverse and dangerous set of incentives, wherein the state materially benefits from treating prisoners as less-than-human.

The comment is still there, enable "showdead" in the settings to see it.

Once you can harvest organs from prisoners who committed outrageous crimes, the number of those prisoners will magically increase.

“Be the match”-like programs would be ill advised if you are a rare match due to the risk of powerful political actors using imprisonment to extract from you.

Nice dystopia.

> Even if the state had the best of intentions (and it clearly doesn't), this creates a very perverse and dangerous set of incentives, wherein the state materially benefits from treating prisoners as less-than-human.

Yeah, this is like the incentive problem with prison labor (and the 13th Amendment loophole) in the US, except that it creates an incentive for mass killing rather than mass long-term incarceration.

Back in med school one of my professors, chinese origin, held a seminar about his research how china uses non-consenting prisoners to harvest organs. Since then i lost a bit of faith in humanity.

It is my understanding that US prisoners are not able to donate blood. The prison population is considered to have too high a level of drug use and other red flags to be a safe source for blood donation. So even if we set aside the entire human rights/consent issue, this seems like a dangerous medical practice for those receiving the organs.

The sort of person sitting in US prisons is very different from those in Chinese ones.

It’s interesting how scientific journals are emerging as a source of information and ethical discussion (as they were originally) after being seen as transcripts of any scientifically relevant observation with a p-value below .05

More interesting is the tone of that article: not discussing, or looking at arguments but plainly stating that a crime is being committed at scale and condemning it the clearest way it can: publishing detailed evidence and stating a new editorial policy. The editorial policy feels strangely inadequate to the for-profit genocide that they describe but that’s the extend of the authority of the committee.

Personally, I think that the ethical aspects of harvesting organs from people sentenced to death are open to discussion.

If society finds it acceptable to put people to death for a number of serious crimes then it may also be felt acceptable to 'get some good out of it' by saving others' lives.

In any case, one aspect is that this may provide an incentive to sentence people to death because organs are needed...

a country can decide to impose the death penalty for many reasons that would objectionable for people outside of that country. Plenty of examples in the 20th century.

Agreed, but I don't think this is relevant.

The death sentence part is indeed the potentially scandalous part, and the biggest ethical and moral dilemma, either in general or because if the offense that carries it depending on people's opinions. The (lesser, IMHO) ethical issue here arises after that although one aspect is the incentive this creates, as already mentioned.

In the future portrayed in Larry Niven's "Known Space" science fiction stories, the demand for transplanted organs became so large that even jaywalking became a capital crime.

I think the main concern should be using death penalty in a first place.

Western yellow-peril propaganda, not backed up by any evidence.

I wonder if western media will bash communist china for this egregious behavior

From a collectivist point of view it makes total sense to overrule the individual rights not to donate organs for the "greater good"

Just label them 'donation-hesitant'.

So the definition of "nonconsenting prisoners" is "killing a person without their consent...". That makes every organ transplantation of prisoners "nonconsenting" since nobody consents to their own execution. It doesn't mean the prisoners did or did not consent to donating their organs. It just says they didn't consent to be executed.

I'm against any and all organ donation. So I don't support taking the organs of prisoners. But the author's problem here isn't with organ donations but with the death penalty. He's not saying that the prisoners or their families didn't donate their organs, he's saying prisoners cannot consent because they are prisoners.

The article also said that singapore and taiwan used to allow prisoner's organ donations until their were "bullied" into dropping the practice. So it seems like it is a cultural issue. If the chinese want to allow prisoners to donate their organs, who are we to say otherwise. We use aborted fetuses for medical experiments. Should china be allowed to force us to stop such behavior? Not to mention medical testing on poor people in africa, india, etc.

Is it any better to take organs from poor and desperate people? Use poor people for medical experiments?

That's clearly not the definition the article uses, given that it at length discusses evidence that refused consent to organ use is ignored and how that's a problem with trusting Chinese claims to the contrary.

I'm not sure if you are "joking" or not aware of history, but here is some reading to answer your question why we don't do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

The nazis didn't invent human experimentation.

Human experimentation happened in the US before the nazis.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cruel-medica...

Also, we created the largest human experimentat during ww2 - hiroshima and nagasai which was used to test the short-term and long-term effects of radiation on a large sample size.

On aborigines before the nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

On native canadians before the nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

The pioneers of unethical human experimentation was the US and Britain. Germany came fairly late to the game. And unethical human experimentation continued long after ww2. You can look those up yourself.

Funny how we always have to look to the nazis for evil when all we have to do is look in the mirror. Nevermind we recruited nazi scientists to work in our institutions after ww2.

https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...

So I don't think your assertion is true.

There is no assertion in my post that the nazis invented unethical medical experimentation which would be absurd. Neither did The US. It is a famous example taught in medical history classes.

> There is no assertion in my post that the nazis invented unethical medical experimentation which would be absurd.

But you asserted it's why we stopped. So your logic is we were okay with experimenting on black slaves, aborigines, natives, etc, but it was the nazis that made up stop? Even though we recruited these nazi scientists after ww2 and even though we continued with unethical human experimentation after ww2?

Why not admit you were wrong and just move on?

> It is a famous example taught in medical history classes.

Then you should ask your school to provide a broader/complete view of history.

We are still carrying out human experimentation on poor people - especially in africa and india. In case you were wondering.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/bio...

Please take a look at HN Guidelines, especially:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have a few questions on this: - If the family of the prisoner consents, then would it be ok? - If they are going to do it anyway.Wouldn't be better that they share the research with the world?

I understand that it has to do with human dignity and rights, etc. But I always assumed that here in the US you get your organs taken off(I'm aware of the mark on the DL) anyway, when you die in an accident, etc. Do the family of the deceased checks the body to make sure all the organs are there? Just asking, I don't know a lot about ethics related to medicine.

No, it wouldn't be OK by international governing standards. Ethical Rules are very strict and explicit prisoner "consent" is one of these areas. The other thing is that the donor numbers china is presenting to the medical community don't make statistically much sense except if you have a huge population of non-consenting prisoners. Which is also the reason why china is banned from many international donor programs.

Considering that a number of Western countries have moved to "deemed consent" when it comes to organ harvesting I don't think that the absence of explicit consent is the sticking point. Rather, I think the ethical issue is ignoring explicit refusal.

yeah, makes sense.

From what I remember from Human Subjects training in my grad school days, the prison environment is considered to be so coercive that it pretty much makes "informed consent" unobtainable. While some studies are still done on prisoners, the bar to getting such a study approved is very high (or at least, is supposed to be very high).

There have been indeed cases where organs were harvested without permission (not just from prisoners, either). The difference is that in the United States (and almost all other countries) this is considered to be a crime, and you go to jail if you get caught doing it.

Yeah, I was just wondering if hospitals actually have a way of getting away with this, as families never check for their loved ones body.

> If they are going to do it anyway. Wouldn't be better that they share the research with the world?

There’s precedent already that these types of things are inhumane and the data shouldn’t be used strictly based on the ethics of it. One example includes experiments done by Nazi Germany in the 1940s[0].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

I see, makes sense, I knew about the experiments conducted by Germans in the concentration camps, I thought we brought them home afterwards. I understand.

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