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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that this kind of innovative idea seems to elicit a knee-jerk negative response in terms of ethics. (To the extent where even the person having the idea initially assumes it must be unethical!) Certainly it shares characteristics with unethical scenarios - a rich person buying a spot on a donor list, forcing others to wait longer for instance. But this particular idea seems to leave no one worse off, and many people considerably better off.

Of course, it would be ideal if resources were simply abundant and all these trials could be funded without giving special treatment to wealthy donors. But given that we don't live in that world, I would certainly rather see one wealthy donor and nine other individuals (for example) get access to a potentially life-saving therapy than to have them all die in the name of equality.

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> It's unfortunate that this kind of innovative idea seems to illicit a knee-jerk negative response in terms of ethics.

It's a shame that autocomplete can still elicit laughs.

I like to think about it in another way: If poor people were given preference in terms of going on drug trials, would the same groups be up in arms about the poor being used as guinea pigs for the rich?

I wish I could blame autocomplete for that one!

    > If poor people were given preference in terms of going
    > on drug trials, would the same groups be up in arms
    > about the poor being used as guinea pigs for the rich?

From the NY Times:

    > What if the first doses of the drug — which had never
    > been used in people and had not even finished the
    > typical animal safety testing — had been given to
    > African patients instead?

    > “It would have been the front-page screaming headline: 
    > ‘Africans used as guinea pigs for American drug
    > company’s medicine,’ ” said Dr. Salim S. Abdool Karim,
    > director of Caprisa, an AIDS research center in South
    > Africa.

And also, while trying to refind this article:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=nws&q=ebola+"Guinea+pigs"&...

> If poor people were given preference in terms of going on drug trials, would the same groups be up in arms about the poor being used as guinea pigs for the rich?

That's already how most drugs are currently tested. We used to test new drugs on prisoners and conscientious objectors, now we just test them on the poor and indigent.

>It's unfortunate that this kind of innovative idea seems to illicit a knee-jerk negative response in terms of ethics.

Why, why let ethics mess up a perfectly profitable business idea?

>Of course, it would be ideal if resources were simply abundant and all these trials could be funded without giving special treatment to wealthy donors.

I don't think it's about resources, it's about their distribution. Such trials CAN be funded "without giving special treatment to wealthy donors" -- we're spending trillions more giving special treatmeants to wealthy people,(such as bailouts).

My point was that it isn't unethical; people just instinctively assume that it must be.

I'm not going to argue the public policy motivation behind bailouts as we could go on quite a tangent there, but the fact is that many clinical trials go unfunded. Obviously money exists somewhere, and the government could unilaterally decide that it's more valuable to fund clinical research than to bail out failing companies (or buy F35s, or build schools, or whatever). Thus far they haven't done so. This plan, on the other hand, could actually start saving people's lives immediately.

I would say it is because there are many branches of ethics and not every one is consequentialist as you seem to be. Meaning that some people think that what is or what isn't ethical depends of consequence.

Other group - deontologist believe in some rule or sets of rule and they might not be concerned with consenquences that much.

Famous trolley problem describe this idea nicely.

Obviously this is problem on its own.

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