industry & research
campusreview.com.au
Doubts cast on
organ research
Scientific papers based on
organs from Chinese prisoners
raise “issues of complicity”.
By Dallas Bastian
N
umerous papers published
on transplants involve organs
unethically harvested from
executed prisoners, a new review argues.
Australian and international researchers
investigated whether papers reporting
research on transplants in China
from 2000 to April 2017 comply with
international professional standards
such as excluding research that involves
biological material from executed
prisoners and obtaining the consent
of donors.
Hundreds of papers failed against
those metrics. Of the 445 included
studies, 412 (92.5 per cent) did not
report whether organs were sourced
from executed prisoners, and 439
(99 per cent) failed to report that organ
sources gave consent for transplantation.
When held against another standard
looked at, Institutional Review Board (IRB)
approval, the papers fared slightly better.
Almost three-quarters (324) reported
approval from an IRB.
Curiously, the authors said that of the
papers claiming that no prisoners’ organs
were involved in the transplants, 19 of
them involved “transplants that took
place prior to 2010, when there was no
volunteer donor program in China”.
“A large body of unethical research now
exists,” the study read, “raising issues of
complicity and moral hazard to the extent
that the transplant community uses and
benefits from the results of this research”.
The practice has been deemed
unethical by leading health and
transplantation bodies, notably because
the “coercive situation of being on
death row undermines the possibility of
ethically valid consent”. Other concerns
include the potential for a complete lack
of consent and reports of non-voluntary
organ harvesting.
Unethical procurement of organs from
China is not unique to fields of research.
Recently, a controversial exhibition
featuring plastinated human cadavers,
organs, embryos and fetuses came under
the scrutiny of a parliamentary inquiry.
It held that the Real Bodies exhibition
was “illustrative of an apparent gap in
the current legislation” surrounding
human organ trafficking and organ
transplant tourism.
MP David Shoebridge told the sub-
committee investigating human organ
trafficking: “The proprietors … have been
asked about the circumstances in which
these bodies came into their possession,
and they have been unable and unwilling
to prove that any of the persons on
display ever gave their consent.”
The authors of the scoping review into
papers reporting on Chinese transplants
said the continued use of the research in
question raises similar potential issues of
complicity as data obtained from medical
experiments in wartime.
They wrote: “There is broad consensus
that it is unethical to make use of the
data obtained from Nazi and Japanese
medical experiments where the victims
were killed or harmed in the course
of the research. The use of research
based on organs sourced from executed
Chinese prisoners, many of whom are
prisoners of conscience, falls at the
severe end of this spectrum of moral
wrongs in research.
“The continued presence of these
papers in the literature creates moral
hazard as it demonstrates that breaches
of ethical standards in research will be
ignored or tolerated, thereby removing
incentives for future compliance with
these standards.”
They called for immediate retraction
of all papers reporting research based
A large body of unethical
research now exists,
raising issues of complicity
and moral hazard.
on the use of organs from executed
prisoners, pending investigation of
individual papers. Determining the
likely veracity of claims about ethical
organ procurement requires sustained
investigation, the authors said.
“Such investigation is possible, and
has formed the basis for a retraction of a
paper that falsely claimed more organs
were procured from volunteers than there
were reported volunteers at the relevant
hospital. This is to date the only retraction
in the literature.” ■
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