The ability of patients to try experimental drugs outside of clinical trials has a lot in common with self-experimentation. The former empowers the patient; the latter empowers the amateur scientist. Another form of health-related empowerment is to allow people to buy and sell organs. Of course, some people are against this:
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a Berkeley anthropologist — now in residence at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute — has documented how wealthy organ brokers exploit the impoverished in places like Moldova and South Africa. She cites a moral parable . . . A starving man adrift with others on a raft does not have the right to eat his fellow passengers. [Huh?] Scheper-Hughes suggests there is something of the same “predatory” aspect to organ sales — a creepy assertion “that I have the right to the body of another person, to live.”
From the Boston Globe. To me, the creepy assertion is “I, Professor Scheper-Hughes, know better than other people what they should do with their own bodies.” Alas, this sort of professorial arrogance is common. I encountered it with the UC Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects: I must have a certain control group in my experiment, they said. As if they knew how to do my research better than I did. I once heard an NPR commentator, describing her IRB participation, boast about this: “Sometimes a control was missing, or we felt the study was misguided.” A website about IRB abuses has many similar stories.
Thanks for the comment. I agree, what Scheper-Hughes said is taken as reasonable and appropriate by many people, including the writer of the article. However, it’s the standard view among IRBs that they are entitled to force researchers to run whatever control groups they (the IRB) thinks are appropriate. I don’t think the fact that something is the standard view or well-accepted should shield it from criticism.
I also agree, by itself Scheper-Hughes’ belief isn’t arrogant. Maybe I should have made that clearer. It isn’t arrogant to think organs shouldn’t be sold. It is the context and certitude that bother me. For me, the problem arises when someone goes further than a simple statement of belief — is so sure of herself — that she forces or advocates forcing others who disagree with her and know much more about their situation to go along with her beliefs. It is especially distasteful when the advocate is powerful and the people she is telling what to do are powerless. And when you defend your view by saying that buying an organ is like asserting a “right” to eat somebody (to me there is a big difference between trading and taking and between cannibalism and organ commerce) and that a statement of disagreement with your point of view is a “creepy assertion” and when the speaker is powerful and considered a serious thinker . . . that strikes me as creepy.