Call for Retraction of 400 Scientific Papers On Organ Transplantation Amid Fears That Organs Came From Chinese Prisoners (theguardian.com) 141
A world-first study has called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on organ transplantation, amid fears the organs were obtained unethically from Chinese prisoners. The Guardian reports: The Australian-led study exposes a mass failure of English language medical journals to comply with international ethical standards in place to ensure organ donors provide consent for transplantation. The study was published on Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ Open. Its author, the professor of clinical ethics Wendy Rogers, said journals, researchers and clinicians who used the research were complicit in "barbaric" methods of organ procurement.
"There's no real pressure from research leaders on China to be more transparent," Rogers, from Macquarie University in Sydney, said. "Everyone seems to say, 'It's not our job.' The world's silence on this barbaric issue must stop." A report published in 2016 found a large discrepancy between official transplant figures from the Chinese government and the number of transplants reported by hospitals. While the government says 10,000 transplants occur each year, hospital data shows between 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year. The report provides evidence that this gap is being made up by executed prisoners of conscience.
"There's no real pressure from research leaders on China to be more transparent," Rogers, from Macquarie University in Sydney, said. "Everyone seems to say, 'It's not our job.' The world's silence on this barbaric issue must stop." A report published in 2016 found a large discrepancy between official transplant figures from the Chinese government and the number of transplants reported by hospitals. While the government says 10,000 transplants occur each year, hospital data shows between 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year. The report provides evidence that this gap is being made up by executed prisoners of conscience.
What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:4, Interesting)
...was many centuries ago however... The science is still valid though which is what matters...
Re:What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better analogy would be Nazi cold exposure science.
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Better analogy would be Nazi cold exposure science.
I think you mean Japanese cold exposure science. Nazis also did their own, but most of the people experimented on were Chinese prisoners of war.
Re:What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:5, Interesting)
Better analogy would be Nazi cold exposure science.
Indeed. Much of what we know about reviving cold water drowning victims comes from research conducted by Nazis on prisoners.
Should we insist that these victims die instead, because the research was unethical? There are activists calling for exactly that. So the death of innocent people would be honored by ... deaths of additional innocent people.
The Dacau Hypothermia Experiments [nejm.org]
Why is the organ transplant research any different?
What is the next step? Should we also throwout research from scientists that were unethical in the personal lives?
Re:What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Nazi government no longer exists. Discarding their research saves nobody. The Chinese government still exists. Discarding their research may prevent them from doing more like these.
Continuing to allow this does exactly that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Organ harvesting from a Nazi-like Chinese government exists, and is going on. Discarding the research sends a message the practice must die out, and good ethical science will replace it like it was never there.
Continuing to allow this does exactly that. It continues to allow prisoners to have their organs unethically harvested in a macabre dystopian 3rd world manner.
You're an apologist. You should have your organs harvested.
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The Chinese government still exists. Discarding their research may prevent them from doing more like these.
China isn't going to eradicate capital punishment because "The West" refuses to read their research papers.
Deleting these papers from the archives is going to save exactly zero lives.
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You flipped the target of the argument. I couldn't give a shit about the existence of the Nazis (anymore) or the Chinese government. What is relevant here is the existence of us as a species healthy as a result of research which was already conducted.
By throwing it out you're not punishing the Chinese government. You're punishing the people who live due to the scientific advances. You're punishing the people who died by making their deaths irrelevant.
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May? Why would China care since they can use the research internally. to their own advantage?
The idea a country without ethics would be impressed by the exposure same is absurd. They don't do research to help the world, just a few billion of their own people.
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Here's an interesting question for you though. Should possession of child pornography be illegal? Arresting someone for having an illegal digital image that they had no role in the production of would be similarly useless or is it different here? The reasoning is the same. Arresting someone for possessing child pornography doesn't remove the abuse or suffering that the victim
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The difference from your analogy is that the world benefits from the research, whether it was done ethically or not. The world does not benefit from CP.
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No, the world does not benefit from the research. The world slips closer into harvesting people for research purposes from the research, which is not beneficial.
Re:What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:4)
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> Should possession of child pornography be illegal?
Should calling a transgender man "she" be punishable? Both involve speech, and both provide medical information which can be used to save a life.
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Indeed. Much of what we know about reviving cold water drowning victims comes from research conducted by Nazis on prisoners.
Did you even glance at the paper you linked? It says the research is total rubbish due to poor design, shoddy and incomplete data collection, lack of cardiovascular knowledge, outright falsification and fabrication to please Himmler, and totally unsupported conclusions. We most definitely learning nothing from that particular set of tortures masquerading as experiments.
Re:What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that you did not understand or perhaps did not read the article you cited on "The Dacau Hypothermia Experiments". The concluding paragraph emphatically states that the "research" was useless:
Re:What about the illegal autopsies in England... (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed. More quotes to refute the value of that nazi "research"
This review of the Dachau hypothermia experiments reveals the critical shortcomings in scientific content and credibility. The project was conducted without an orderly experimental protocol, with inadequate methods and erratic execution. The report is riddled with inconsistencies. There is also evidence of data falsification and suggestions of fabrication. Many conclusions are not supported by the facts presented. The flawed science is compounded by evidence that the director of the project showed a consistent pattern of dishonesty and deception in his professional as well as his personal life, thereby stripping the study of the last vestige of credibility. On analysis, the Dachau hypothermia study has all of the ingredients of a scientific fraud, and rejection of the data on purely scientific grounds is inevitable. They cannot advance science or save human lives.
To the above I will add, that the "study" lacks one of the basic requirements of the scientific method: reproducibility.
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This is the case for a great deal of human medical research, especially involving trauma.
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It's clearly flawed data, but for decades searches were called off based on the survival estimates the Nazis generated.
The world has learned more since. e.g. They're not dead until they are 'warm and dead'.
It's revisionism to say the data wasn't used.
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The people who did the work got protected and looked after in the USA and UK after 1945.
What to do with the research for Germany and Japan?
The people who worked with Germans in 1946?
The people in the USA who got promoted in the 1950's-80's who worked with directly with Germans in the USA using German results and data?
The people now who studied the same German science in the USA and who are working for p
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Jobs was of Lebanese descent. The odds of him finding a tissue match in China is low.
IIRC he got a lobe of a living person's liver, which extended his life.
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He got a transplant. You have no idea you lying faggot. Stop blathering moron. Stop making dumb shit up. Get smart, stupid. Google it first. https://www.farces.com/did-steve-jobs-get-favored-transplant-treatment/
Data is data. Make it mean something. (Score:5, Insightful)
A while ago, a bunch of Nazi scientists did some very, very unethical research. It was the kind of thing that would turn most people's stomachs. But rather than throw it away, we kept it, and for two reasons.
First, it was new data. They studied things that nobody else was studying (with reason) and medical science learned a lot from this.
Secondly, throwing it away would mean that those who died during this died for nothing. At least this way their sacrifice led to something meaningful.
Provided that these studies are accurate, they shouldn't be rejected, purely because we don't like the source. Sure, stop more abuses and ensure that there aren't any more studies in this vein, but the data exists, don't just throw it away. Keeping it means that we know more and there's less call to repeat these studies!
Re:Data is data. Make it mean something. (Score:5, Interesting)
This boycott won't change anything about unethical transplantations being done because the study is not an incentive for being unethical, they merely piggyback on shitty things which are happening.
More so it is hilarious that "professor of ethics" should be keenly aware of arrows of causality in ethics. Exploiting something for can't otherwise change isn't unethical, on the contrary, it's making the best out of a shitty situation.
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"it's not like the study authors incentivized the chinese corrupt hospital system to procure more illegal transplants." ACTUALLY IT IS VERY CLOSE TO THAT.
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And while we can't know for sure if research drives more executions (than mere transplantation does) the West sure as hell doesn't need to be glorifying such studies, and rather journals should forbid publishing and apply other pressures to make the scientists there, and their government minders, stop doing this via embarrassment.
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and apply other pressures to make the scientists there, and their government minders, stop doing this via embarrassment.
If the Chinese government has not been embarrassed by the public revelation of the justifications they are using to execute prisoners, is it really sane to think they'll be embarrassed because a few journals won't publish research that studies the results of transplant operations of organs harvested from the dead?
Re:Data is data. Make it mean something. (Score:4)
Because the studies were public, a meta-study could be made approximating the real number of organ harvesting using this as a source. Remove incentives of chinese academia to publish in western academia because "you talk about bad things! therefore you are bad too and we'll have none of that!", and you live in the dark.
It's far more likely one could actually cause harm by knee-jerk "sure as hell doesn't need to be glorifying such studies". Pointing out the issue because it's laid out in clear *is* useful, moral stances that bad things shouldn't be in the public view just because they're bad - definitely isn't.
Re:Data is data. Make it mean something. (Score:5, Insightful)
Provided that these studies are accurate, they shouldn't be rejected, purely because we don't like the source
The fact is that accepting these studies encourages them to murder more people for their organs, which is something we know they are doing [wikipedia.org].
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The fact is that accepting these studies encourages them to murder more people for their organs, which is something we know they are doing [wikipedia.org].
The fact is, they're going to do it anyway. The Chinese place a much lower value on human life than we do. We can ignore their papers, but all that does is let scientists around the world without our ethics to learn stuff much faster than we will.
Larry Niven had the concept of, shit, don't remember what he called it. But 3 speeding tickets made you an organ donor. The Chinese aren't too far from that.
Remember, it wasn't that long ago that they not only shot people in the back of the head, but they
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Larry Niven had the concept of, shit, don't remember what he called it.
He called it organlegging.
But 3 speeding tickets made you an organ donor. The Chinese aren't too far from that.
They've executed people for cheating on their taxes, and they imprison people and set them to labor for practicing Christianity — not that I'm a fan of that, but I'm even less a fan of persecution of people for ideas.
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Organlegging was illegally harvesting organs, as in kidnapping and killing someone rather then doing it as a legal execution.
In a world with organ transplants perfected, there was a high demand for organs, including illegally gotten organs. Note that the people democratically voted in all the execution laws in that universe.
How many people would pay for an illegally gotten organ today if it would prolong their life? I'd bet a sizeable minority. Same with voting in the death penalty for various crimes if it
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You beat me to it, I was going to mention Niven. I think it was part of his Gil Hamilton series, the guy with the psychokinetic arm.
It's super creepy that this has essentially become a real thing, but sanctioned and committed by a huge government rather than a black market gang.
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I'm one of those people who benefited from Nazi medical research. At this point it's too late to really do anything about it, it's all been integrated into other research and the like, but if it was more recent, based on potentially compromised research...
I don't know, honestly. I don't want to encourage it, I don't want those lives to have been lost completely for nothing, and I don't want other people besides myself to suffer when they could be treated.
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Slave labour, with very shitty conditions for the labourers.
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TFA provided none, just alarmist rambling. "We know they'll kill more people because of the research because they kill people for other reasons, such as the huge sums paid on the hospital grey market" is no proof, not even indirect one as you're equating huge sums for an organ with puny researcher who only does a write up on (medical, not sociopolitical) outcomes of doing that.
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The fact is that accepting these studies encourages them to murder more people for their organs, which is something we know they are doing.
Prisoners' organs were not harvested for the purpose of doing research. They were taken to perform transplants. Disqualifying some ancillary research isn't going to slow or stop their practice of taking organs from prisoners sentenced to death. Prohibiting non-voluntary organ harvesting probably won't slow down the rate of executions either. Prisoners will just go to their graves with all of their organs.
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You know nothing about this, why opine?
Because I can read.
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess you have never done any Human Subject testing. All testing in the US has to have IRB approval (https://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm126420.htm) and the scientists doing the research need to have gone through the IRB course and sign that they can't not use data that is not been submitted and reviewed prior to experiments so that they don't do something illegal and un-ethical, like the Stanford Prison Experiment. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment).
Yes maybe some good data came from that, but the means do not justify the ends, same thing applies when doing testing on animals.
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The hubbub about the Stanford Prison Experiment is bogus. You know that, right?
All participants could have left at any time. All they had to do was say "I want to end the experiment.". They all knew it.
The truth is they all wanted to get paid, and when the diabetic dude died they needed to concoct a story that absolved them of any guilt in the matter.
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Regardless, this is an interesting discussion of role of free will in capitalism in general - aka is buying product of wage slave labor unethical? Everyone in the supply chain technically agreed to it, buuuut....
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What (political rhetoriticians in) the West view as the "race to the bottom", people literally living a dirt-floor existence view as climbing up...way way up... to a proper floor.
Much like the West did 150 years ago with industrialization.
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There were times it did cross the line into slave labour. Paying a dollar a day and charging $7.25 room and board a week with debtors prison being a real thing. Even charging $6 a week is pretty close to slavery when those fees were hidden when the worker signed up.
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But merely observing something unethical in your study, even if you provided no incentive for it to happen? Crying wolf there smells more like a storm in a teacup at best, hidden motives at worst.
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Yet, there are many, many instances where people violate their IRB guidelines and yet we don't throw away all that data either, we just amend the IRB to include the established practice, even if it's ethically dubious. Most studies will even have language like: once the data is collected, even if you retract consent or an oversight body discontinues this study, we'll continue using the data anyway for various purposes.
The main point of contention here is that the Chinese Government and Chinese culture in ge
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This is not the first case of unethical data: there's a lot of valuable scientific data from the Holocaust and Unit 731, but those were taken after the fact that those groups got destroyed then after they got that data. I think the bigger question is "can there be justice for the people harmed by this?" and "how do we move forward without enabling this behavior even more?"
Why stop this? (Score:1)
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The far lefties KNOW that China is unethical in many things.
Yes: everyone knows that.
This is just more of the same that they continue to back.
There's no outrage quite like manufactured outrage. Go on point to when someone you consider "the left" supported China. Bonus points for telling me that China is communist without actually showing when someone supported them.
Nazi medical research ethics (Score:3)
For those posting with comments along the lines of: "Why doesn't it matter if innocent slaves were tortured, the science is valid?!"
Ethics in medical (any) science is a very important, and we shouldn't encourage third-world dictatorships to create more suffering by accepting unethical medical research.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ethics-of-using-medical-data-from-nazi-experiments [jewishvirtuallibrary.org]
Holocaust survivor Susan Vigorito found the use of the word "data" a sterile term. She was 3½ when she and her twin sister, Hannah, arrived at Auschwitz. They were housed for an entire year in Mengele's private lab in a wooden cage a yard and a half wide. Without anesthetic, Mengele would repeatedly scrape at the bone tissue of one of her legs. Her sister died from repeated injections to her spinal column. She claims that she is the real data, the living data of Dr. Mengele.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822534/ [nih.gov]
Re: Nazi medical research ethics (Score:2)
The idea that harvesting organs without consent is "unethical" is dubious at best. Our opposition to it in the west stems entirely from absurd religious beliefs.
Even if I were to accept as given that it actually is unethical, it would be almost inconsequentially so. It certainly doesn't compare to the kind of unethical experiments which many of the others here are discussing. At worst it's just theft; a poor reason to reject data which will almost invariably save lives.
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Re: Nazi medical research ethics (Score:2, Flamebait)
Organs ain't cheap because so many fuckheads don't consent, or can't be bothered to fill out a donation form. You take away the consent requirement, the supply increases, the price plummets, and there's no longer a reason to murder anyone.
Of course your entire line of logic kinda sucks anyway. An action doesn't become unethical just because criminals might engage in it. That's like arguing that driving a car is unethical because cars aren't cheap and you driving around in one encourages carjacking.
Re: Nazi medical research ethics (Score:2)
It's not religion, it's property. My body is my body, even if I'm dead. I get to decide what happens to it.
That's fine; I'm perfectly ok with the doctors asking your lifeless corpse whether it has any objections to organ donation.
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For the first point, the example used to illustrate this while disturbing and graphic, is but an emotional appeal. Knowledge does not have an ethical character. It is a comprehension of reality that cannot be altered by how it was obtained. That the sky is blue does not vary dependent
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Ok, so the work was done using illegal, questionable sources, etc. But the work is done, is the science bad?
There's a Pratchett quote along the lines of "The thing about criminals is that they don't obey the law - its part of the job description."
If someone thinks (or was coerced into thinking) that it is OK to torture people, harvest organs without consent etc. then they're not going to blink about falsifying data, especially in an environment where failing to get the result that your superior expects is tantamount to volunteering to be the next experimental subject.
Haven't looked at the organ transplant study
Worst part is... (Score:2)
that many of those victims only crime was to be against the government doing/allowing stuff like this to happen.
Sadly, only Chinese people have any real chance of stopping the Chinese government.
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And now you know (Score:2)
And know you know how the mega-wealthy intend to live forever. Let's see ... an old rich dude dies today of liver failure, or an impoverished "prisoner" guilty of somehow offending TPTB dies today. Decisions, decisions ...
Re: And now you know (Score:2)
Misread as TPB. anakata's coming for you!
pics and vids (Score:2)
Rule of the Internet, remember?
discrepancy in number of executions (Score:1)
or unit 731 (Score:2)
Unnecessary Waste is Unethical, Too (Score:2)
We cannot reverse what was done. If the scientists unwittingly used data from forced transplants, they are neither guilty nor complicit. If they knowingly violated ethical guidelines, they can be censured or blacklisted.
We have two choices: whether or not we use this data in the future now that we know about its provenance, and whether or not we use the knowledge that was gained earlier.
I believe that this call for retraction is an overstep and a mistake. Censure the scientists who knowingly benefited from
Godwin's Law (Score:2)
Finally an example of where it doesn't really apply. This is some appalling stuff. All of it should be thrown out.
As someone pointed out, while the previous example doesn't exist anymore so the data can be used, whereas the current example does exist and we shouldn't be encouraging/condoning this behavior and should be actively censuring them.
Chinese Science (Score:3)
While most is purloined from elsewhere, the rest of it is tainted in the same way Nazi Science [wikipedia.org] is tainted.
China is a Totalitarian Communist Dictatorship with a facade of a Capitalist Economy.
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The US isn't much better.
Obvious China shill