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Comment by masterof0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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