> More recently in the news was the miraculous survival of a 16-year-old boy who stowed away in the wheel hub of a Boeing 747 travelling to Hawaii. He survived freezing temperatures and very low oxygen levels occurring at the 38,000 ft flight altitude for several hours and recovered with no medical complications. Doctors speculate that his body quickly entered a hibernative state due to the rapid temperature drop thus permitting him to survive at the minimal oxygen levels.
This example where something unique occurs but our ethics prevent us from anything beyond speculation, makes me wonder how much faster we could expand our understanding of medical science by instituting a voluntary and humane program for human experimentation.
Is such a concept inherently contradictory or can it be done?
It’s very hard to structure such a program. Just some concerns:
- even if it’s voluntary, how do we ensure that volunteers are not coerced?
- how do we validate that volunteers truly comprehend the risks?
- how do we ensure that volunteers are of sound mind and not suicidal?
- if someone is gravely injured or disabled in the experiment, is the institution prepared to care for them for the rest of their life?
- if we offer compensation, how do we account for the fact that people of lower socio-economic status will be more likely to take that compensation for the same risk?
Keep in mind that we are also only 70 years away from some striking cases of the Medical-government complex in multiple countries performing some horrid experiments on human subjects without their consent.
> how do we ensure that volunteers are not coerced?
Speak to them privately, away from any outside influences. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to ensure someone isn't coerced. I suppose there are complex situations (e.g. someone is holding your children hostage) where this may not be sufficient, but it's unclear why someone would go to that trouble to coerce someone to lend themselves to such an experiment. This seems like mostly a non-issue.
> how do we validate that volunteers truly comprehend the risks?
Have a psychiatrist/psychologist interview them. Give them a long cooling off period, so that it's not a spur of the moment decision. Require the sign-off of the psychiatrist/psychologist, or panel thereof before approval.
> how do we ensure that volunteers are of sound mind and not suicidal?
Why do you need to do that? If someone wants to kill themselves, we might as well let them contribute to humanity in so doing.
> if someone is gravely injured or disabled in the experiment, is the institution prepared to care for them for the rest of their life?
We could decide that they must be, if we felt that was necessary.
> if we offer compensation, how do we account for the fact that people of lower socio-economic status will be more likely to take that compensation for the same risk?
Why is that a problem? People often point this out, but I don't really get it. Let's phrase it another way: Why shouldn't we give poor people agency over themselves and their situation? The fact that poorer people are more get the option to do this thing that could improve their situation seems like only a great thing to me. This only gives them a new choice that they didn't previously have - it's hard for me to see how that could be a bad thing.
>> if we offer compensation, how do we account for the fact that people of lower socio-economic status will be more likely to take that compensation for the same risk?
>Why is that a problem?
You don't understand why this is a problem because, I'd wager, you're not in this situation yourself.
It's absolutely perverse that, instead of striving for a more egalitarian society, we would effectively force the most vulnerable among to sell themselves to scientific experiments to survive (incidentally, the premise of "Every sperm is sacred", comedy song from Monty Python).
Poor people already give plasma and sign up for medical trials for quick money.
While the consequences aren't fatal, this is already happening.
Why do people who are not poor always feel like they should be telling the poor how to live their lives? You do realize that many poor people are incredibly intelligent, just that they are missing a network to get to a higher level.
> It's absolutely perverse that, instead of striving for a more egalitarian society, we would effectively force the most vulnerable among to sell themselves to scientific experiments to survive
So, you think the situation they're in now, where they don't have this option, is preferable to the one where they do have this option? Nobody said anything about 'instead of', either.
The point is: unless you have a perfectly egalitarian society, some people will have more stuff and other people will have less. Jobs offering stuff are, inherently, more attractive to those who currently have less stuff. There is nothing wrong about that, in fact, that's the mechanism by which people with less stuff acquire more stuff. Why, exactly, do you believe they shouldn't be able to make that choice for themselves?
It's not just having "stuff". Without money, you have no food, no shelter. It's a very effective form of coercion: do this thing you would otherwise never do, or you and your family will starve.
Here are some points:
- It's much, much, easier to coerce someone into doing something they don't want to do when it's a legal option than when it's illegal in all circumstances.
- People in desperate situations are among the least likely to make their decisions rationally, so they might take the option even if they would have found a better one otherwise.
- It lowers the threshold of how bad things can get. Right now, if you have no money, you're in a shitty situation. With that "option", I expect a common outcome is that you take it, have a bunch of health complications and/or die, don't get compensated very well (there's a large supply of poor people like you and you're desperate, so your bargaining position is weak), and end up in an even worse situation.
- Nobody said "instead of", but there is a limited amount of attention and resources directed at getting better laws passed, and this one is extremely far down on my list of priorities.
I'll ask again: How is it that these people are made better off by not having this choice? Why do you think these people aren't capable of making their own decisions?
It's the same reason you can't buy a kidney in most countries. As soon as you make it possible to buy life, you can create a system that exploits the poor.
E.G: I was watching an episode on kidney trade (Netflix TV show The Traffickers) and a man was duped into selling his kidney. He expected more but only received less than $300. There might have been complications with his operation because now he has pain that he will have to deal with his entire life. I'm not sure if he actually understood the risk of this entire thing. And he has also been ostracized from his community. This system of organ trade, even though it is illegal, has become so bad that it's like a human pyramid scheme. They recruit one person to sell their kidney and every time that person gets someone else to sell a kidney, they take a cut. Pretty terrible stuff.
The perfect example. The kidney market is, in fact, the exact reason for my opinion on this issue. Kidney markets are a wonderful thing, the fact that they are illegal in every country except Iran is an absolute tragedy.
> I was watching an episode on kidney trade (Netflix TV show The Traffickers) and a man was duped into selling his kidney. He expected more but only received less than $300.
That's just fraud. A man was deceived. We have laws for dealing with that.
> There might have been complications with his operation because now he has pain that he will have to deal with his entire life. I'm not sure if he actually understood the risk of this entire thing.
Exactly the sorts of issues that bringing such a market out from underground would resolve.
> And he has also been ostracized from his community
That doesn't even make sense, and if it's true, then it says more about the community than it does kidney markets.
> . This system of organ trade, even though it is illegal, has become so bad that it's like a human pyramid scheme. They recruit one person to sell their kidney and every time that person gets someone else to sell a kidney, they take a cut. Pretty terrible stuff.
Is it more terrible than any other pyramid scheme? If you think there's fraud or deception going on, sure that's terrible. But giving people the right to sell themselves is not inherently terrible.
Maybe you should consider actually thinking about the issue before deciding? Why don't you read the article and get back to me. Literally everyone is better off if we have a liquid market in kidneys.
Peer pressure? Family pressure? "If you loved your family, you would do this for them."
The U.S. government keeps trying to force people in poverty to make harder decisions to be able to use the safety net. Is it so hard to imagine that someday one of the requirements would be subjecting yourself to experimental tests?
Those are just two ideas off the top of my head. I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments, but this does seem like a Pandora's box worth looking very carefully at before opening.
So, poor people shouldn't have the option to do this, because if you give them the choice, someday a republican might make it a requirement of welfare? That seems like a bit of a silly argument.
Was the point of this discussion to discuss why people may be concerned about unintended consequences or to blithely assert omniscience? Maybe I just picked the wrong thread.
Legalizing human experimentation in this manner would result in it being counted as employment (e.g. for tax purposes).
Meanwhile, unemployed people risk losing their benefits if they refuse a job offer. So depending on how these jobs are treated, an employment agency might put you in a position where you may not be able to refuse.
It is unethical to perform such experiments on people regardless of what they say or why. It’s like I tell my children. We strive to be polite to other people because of who we are, not because of who they are. That’s what ethics is about.
To approach it another way, as long as one group of people has an economic benefit from abusing another group, there’s a problem. There’s no way you can ever be certain enough that such a system is being administered fairly and competently. The bureaucratic and ethical abuses and mistakes we get already are bad enough.
Finally, I f anyone is in such a desperate situation that this looks like a good option, then surely there must be other ethical options available for society to intervene?
> It is unethical to perform such experiments on people regardless of what they say or why.
Why? Why shouldn't these people be free to make that choice for themselves?
> To approach it another way, as long as one group of people has an economic benefit from abusing another group, there’s a problem.
How, exactly, are you defining 'abuse'? Is it abuse to offer someone money to do something? It's hard to see how it could be abusive to give someone an option that they didn't previously have.
There is a large group of people who are at the mercy of the system. They do not have the ability to be self-sufficient and are reliant on social assistance.
There is now an incentive for the people who control the system to reduce the level of social assistance, because in so doing they increase the number of people who "voluntarily" submit to risky experimentation.
This proposal seems like adding a new option on an individual level, but on a social level it paradoxically leads to a situation where that group has less choice.
It's like playing the game of chicken on a road where the first person to swerve from a head-on collision loses. Paradoxically the winning move is to visibly remove your own choice by throwing your steering wheel out the window.
> There is now an incentive for the people who control the system to reduce the level of social assistance, because in so doing they increase the number of people who "voluntarily" submit to risky experimentation.
That's quite the logical leap there. And is one that could be made about literally any effort to help the poor, so, i'm not quite sure you've made your point.
>We strive to be polite to other people because of who we are, not because of who they are. That’s what ethics is about.
It's a nice concept, but ethics (and the idea of politeness) are largely relativistic to the interpreter/actor. Even with the idea of normative ethics being dictated by culture and point-of-view out of the way, there are layers to every ethical/moral choice within each doctrine of thought.
Ask people around the world about the ethical treatment of animals, prisoners of war, children, spouses -- you'll get different answers from every individual, with strong weights towards certain behaviors dictated by regional culture and upbringing/experience.
tl;dr : I may think that it's being polite not to spit on me for being a member of a lower caste. YOU might think i'm being polite for opening the door for someone behind me.
Neither opinion is wrong, it's framed by the culture and the person.
To a point what is ethical can depend on the circumstances. In a tribal society with limited scientific or social structures to support investigations, and appropriate legal and justice system might look appalling from our point of view but be the best they can support. However if you do have the technical and cultural resources to support a professional police force, crime labs, judicial process etc, saying that keeping the tribal justice system is ok because culture is relative becomes unsupportable IMHO.
In modern developed society it should never be the case that a person's best economic choice is to sell their health and life for money. It's just not necessary for people to be in that position unless someone wants them to be in that position. Why would anyone want that?
What's the motivation for crating those conditions, and if people do want to put people in that position, how can the rest of us trust that the safeguards someone who would want that would put in place are sufficient and robust?
Right. A lot of people would be willing to risk their life for some really dangerous medical experiment in exchange for a couple of hits of Heroin. Very tricky situation.
I was thinking this too lately when I heard someone talk about brain research on chimpanzees. The chimps are total slaves with no choice in what happens, which is horrible. Would it not be better for humans to be able to volunteer? I guess we would need to keep money out of the equation or it could get unseemly fast.
Uhm... all kinds of animals actually, but you need ethics approval if you use vertebrates. And I don't think you will find non-crazy volunteers for the invasive experiments...
I took neuroscience courses - and a lot of what I learned was made possible by such experiments, so I'm not against them. However, the cost for the animals that get selected is high. You can't do that with humans, only the most benign experiments. But many experiments involves cutting open the head. inserting electrodes at the very least, sometimes you want to see the brain too - there are things you can do, like two-photon microscopy (example: https://www.neurotar.com/contract-research/two-photon-imagin... -- you have to expose the brain), or inject dyes, and other options).
A possible setup (for invasive experiments) is that the animal is drugged, the brain exposed, electrodes inserted, the head fixated. Now you can, stimulate the retina, or the ears, or whiskers, and follow what happens in the living brain. Here is an example for what you get from such an experiment: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/29/9537
> Mice were head-fixed using a titanium head postimplant... For implantation, mice were anesthetized with isoflurane..., and maintained at 37°C body temperature on a thermal blanket (Harvard Apparatus). Following a local injection of Marcaine (50 μl), the scalp and periosteum over the dorsal surface of the skull were removed. The skull was then coated with a thin layer of cyanoacrylate adhesive (Krazy Glue, Elmer's Products).... (etc.)
"And I don't think you will find non-crazy volunteers for the invasive experiments"
Take a look into the "wirehead" culture. There are people right now applying electric currents to their brains because they believe it enhances them in various ways.
Many are sane, unless you define them as insane solely on the basis of being wireheads.
It's a waste and a tragedy that we can't monitor their outcomes in a scientifically valid way. Not to mention chilling their self-reporting with legal uncertainty.
In the past researchers did self experimentation so maybe that would work. Doing risky research on others has a lot of ethical problems. How do you the person hasn't been coerced?
DARPA just announced a somewhat related program, called Biostasis. The emphasis is a little different—-they are interested in battlefield medicine—but there’s bound to be some overlap.
Does the combination of hypothermic state and medically induced coma (“hibernation”) have a prolonging impact on life expectancy? The lower metabolic rate would intuitively suggest that’s a possibility. It’s interesting to think about how this technology, even ahead of use in travel to deep space could be used as a forward only time machine.
This was an absolutely fascinating read, the paper isn't too dense for a layman to read and understand. Finished reading the paper and it definitely makes space travel seem more within our grasp.
Hypothetical question, if gene editing in humans became an accepted thing. I wonder how preserved our metabolic pathways and genes for long term hibernation are.
> TH is a medical treatment in which an injured patient’s body temperature is lowered to 32-34°C (89-93°F) in order to slow the body’s metabolism and minimize ischemic injury.
It looks like they aren't even trying to get close to freezing.
> More recently in the news was the miraculous survival of a 16-year-old boy who stowed away in the wheel hub of a Boeing 747 travelling to Hawaii. He survived freezing temperatures and very low oxygen levels occurring at the 38,000 ft flight altitude for several hours and recovered with no medical complications. Doctors speculate that his body quickly entered a hibernative state due to the rapid temperature drop thus permitting him to survive at the minimal oxygen levels.
This example where something unique occurs but our ethics prevent us from anything beyond speculation, makes me wonder how much faster we could expand our understanding of medical science by instituting a voluntary and humane program for human experimentation.
Is such a concept inherently contradictory or can it be done?
Keep in mind that we are also only 70 years away from some striking cases of the Medical-government complex in multiple countries performing some horrid experiments on human subjects without their consent.
Speak to them privately, away from any outside influences. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to ensure someone isn't coerced. I suppose there are complex situations (e.g. someone is holding your children hostage) where this may not be sufficient, but it's unclear why someone would go to that trouble to coerce someone to lend themselves to such an experiment. This seems like mostly a non-issue.
> how do we validate that volunteers truly comprehend the risks?
Have a psychiatrist/psychologist interview them. Give them a long cooling off period, so that it's not a spur of the moment decision. Require the sign-off of the psychiatrist/psychologist, or panel thereof before approval.
> how do we ensure that volunteers are of sound mind and not suicidal?
Why do you need to do that? If someone wants to kill themselves, we might as well let them contribute to humanity in so doing.
> if someone is gravely injured or disabled in the experiment, is the institution prepared to care for them for the rest of their life?
We could decide that they must be, if we felt that was necessary.
> if we offer compensation, how do we account for the fact that people of lower socio-economic status will be more likely to take that compensation for the same risk?
Why is that a problem? People often point this out, but I don't really get it. Let's phrase it another way: Why shouldn't we give poor people agency over themselves and their situation? The fact that poorer people are more get the option to do this thing that could improve their situation seems like only a great thing to me. This only gives them a new choice that they didn't previously have - it's hard for me to see how that could be a bad thing.
>Why is that a problem?
You don't understand why this is a problem because, I'd wager, you're not in this situation yourself.
It's absolutely perverse that, instead of striving for a more egalitarian society, we would effectively force the most vulnerable among to sell themselves to scientific experiments to survive (incidentally, the premise of "Every sperm is sacred", comedy song from Monty Python).
While the consequences aren't fatal, this is already happening.
Why do people who are not poor always feel like they should be telling the poor how to live their lives? You do realize that many poor people are incredibly intelligent, just that they are missing a network to get to a higher level.
So, you think the situation they're in now, where they don't have this option, is preferable to the one where they do have this option? Nobody said anything about 'instead of', either.
The point is: unless you have a perfectly egalitarian society, some people will have more stuff and other people will have less. Jobs offering stuff are, inherently, more attractive to those who currently have less stuff. There is nothing wrong about that, in fact, that's the mechanism by which people with less stuff acquire more stuff. Why, exactly, do you believe they shouldn't be able to make that choice for themselves?
Here are some points:
- It's much, much, easier to coerce someone into doing something they don't want to do when it's a legal option than when it's illegal in all circumstances.
- People in desperate situations are among the least likely to make their decisions rationally, so they might take the option even if they would have found a better one otherwise.
- It lowers the threshold of how bad things can get. Right now, if you have no money, you're in a shitty situation. With that "option", I expect a common outcome is that you take it, have a bunch of health complications and/or die, don't get compensated very well (there's a large supply of poor people like you and you're desperate, so your bargaining position is weak), and end up in an even worse situation.
- Nobody said "instead of", but there is a limited amount of attention and resources directed at getting better laws passed, and this one is extremely far down on my list of priorities.
But setting up a system where this is an option, leads to a society where those people might not have the option of not submitting to experimentation.
E.G: I was watching an episode on kidney trade (Netflix TV show The Traffickers) and a man was duped into selling his kidney. He expected more but only received less than $300. There might have been complications with his operation because now he has pain that he will have to deal with his entire life. I'm not sure if he actually understood the risk of this entire thing. And he has also been ostracized from his community. This system of organ trade, even though it is illegal, has become so bad that it's like a human pyramid scheme. They recruit one person to sell their kidney and every time that person gets someone else to sell a kidney, they take a cut. Pretty terrible stuff.
> I was watching an episode on kidney trade (Netflix TV show The Traffickers) and a man was duped into selling his kidney. He expected more but only received less than $300.
That's just fraud. A man was deceived. We have laws for dealing with that.
> There might have been complications with his operation because now he has pain that he will have to deal with his entire life. I'm not sure if he actually understood the risk of this entire thing.
Exactly the sorts of issues that bringing such a market out from underground would resolve.
> And he has also been ostracized from his community
That doesn't even make sense, and if it's true, then it says more about the community than it does kidney markets.
> . This system of organ trade, even though it is illegal, has become so bad that it's like a human pyramid scheme. They recruit one person to sell their kidney and every time that person gets someone else to sell a kidney, they take a cut. Pretty terrible stuff.
Is it more terrible than any other pyramid scheme? If you think there's fraud or deception going on, sure that's terrible. But giving people the right to sell themselves is not inherently terrible.
Here, read this: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/need-a-kidn...
The U.S. government keeps trying to force people in poverty to make harder decisions to be able to use the safety net. Is it so hard to imagine that someday one of the requirements would be subjecting yourself to experimental tests?
Those are just two ideas off the top of my head. I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments, but this does seem like a Pandora's box worth looking very carefully at before opening.
Meanwhile, unemployed people risk losing their benefits if they refuse a job offer. So depending on how these jobs are treated, an employment agency might put you in a position where you may not be able to refuse.
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/refuse-job-offer...
To approach it another way, as long as one group of people has an economic benefit from abusing another group, there’s a problem. There’s no way you can ever be certain enough that such a system is being administered fairly and competently. The bureaucratic and ethical abuses and mistakes we get already are bad enough.
Finally, I f anyone is in such a desperate situation that this looks like a good option, then surely there must be other ethical options available for society to intervene?
Why? Why shouldn't these people be free to make that choice for themselves?
> To approach it another way, as long as one group of people has an economic benefit from abusing another group, there’s a problem.
How, exactly, are you defining 'abuse'? Is it abuse to offer someone money to do something? It's hard to see how it could be abusive to give someone an option that they didn't previously have.
There is now an incentive for the people who control the system to reduce the level of social assistance, because in so doing they increase the number of people who "voluntarily" submit to risky experimentation.
This proposal seems like adding a new option on an individual level, but on a social level it paradoxically leads to a situation where that group has less choice.
It's like playing the game of chicken on a road where the first person to swerve from a head-on collision loses. Paradoxically the winning move is to visibly remove your own choice by throwing your steering wheel out the window.
More choice is not always better.
That's quite the logical leap there. And is one that could be made about literally any effort to help the poor, so, i'm not quite sure you've made your point.
It's a nice concept, but ethics (and the idea of politeness) are largely relativistic to the interpreter/actor. Even with the idea of normative ethics being dictated by culture and point-of-view out of the way, there are layers to every ethical/moral choice within each doctrine of thought.
Ask people around the world about the ethical treatment of animals, prisoners of war, children, spouses -- you'll get different answers from every individual, with strong weights towards certain behaviors dictated by regional culture and upbringing/experience.
tl;dr : I may think that it's being polite not to spit on me for being a member of a lower caste. YOU might think i'm being polite for opening the door for someone behind me.
Neither opinion is wrong, it's framed by the culture and the person.
In modern developed society it should never be the case that a person's best economic choice is to sell their health and life for money. It's just not necessary for people to be in that position unless someone wants them to be in that position. Why would anyone want that?
What's the motivation for crating those conditions, and if people do want to put people in that position, how can the rest of us trust that the safeguards someone who would want that would put in place are sufficient and robust?
I took neuroscience courses - and a lot of what I learned was made possible by such experiments, so I'm not against them. However, the cost for the animals that get selected is high. You can't do that with humans, only the most benign experiments. But many experiments involves cutting open the head. inserting electrodes at the very least, sometimes you want to see the brain too - there are things you can do, like two-photon microscopy (example: https://www.neurotar.com/contract-research/two-photon-imagin... -- you have to expose the brain), or inject dyes, and other options).
A possible setup (for invasive experiments) is that the animal is drugged, the brain exposed, electrodes inserted, the head fixated. Now you can, stimulate the retina, or the ears, or whiskers, and follow what happens in the living brain. Here is an example for what you get from such an experiment: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/29/9537
> Mice were head-fixed using a titanium head postimplant... For implantation, mice were anesthetized with isoflurane..., and maintained at 37°C body temperature on a thermal blanket (Harvard Apparatus). Following a local injection of Marcaine (50 μl), the scalp and periosteum over the dorsal surface of the skull were removed. The skull was then coated with a thin layer of cyanoacrylate adhesive (Krazy Glue, Elmer's Products).... (etc.)
What sane human would allow an experiment like this to be performed on them: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/23/7/2789 (go to "Materials and Methods") - video: https://youtu.be/wPiLLplofYw
Take a look into the "wirehead" culture. There are people right now applying electric currents to their brains because they believe it enhances them in various ways.
Many are sane, unless you define them as insane solely on the basis of being wireheads.
It's a waste and a tragedy that we can't monitor their outcomes in a scientifically valid way. Not to mention chilling their self-reporting with legal uncertainty.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-03-01
It looks like they aren't even trying to get close to freezing.