Researchers fear 400 scientific studies used organs illegally harvested from Chinese prisoners

Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think

A new study suggests hundreds of published scientific papers involving organ transplants in China violated ethical standards.
International professional standards say studies involving organ transplants shouldn’t be published if the organs came from executed prisoners, or donors don’t provide consent.
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China has long been accused of facilitating a shady network of organ harvesting and trafficking, though it’s been difficult to prove.

Hundreds of studies involving research on organ transplant recipients in China might have violated ethics standards, according to a new study that’s called for the retraction of more than 400 published scientific papers.

Published in the journal BMJ Open, the study suggests that thousands of organs used for transplants in China likely come from condemned prisoners, and that past research has largely failed to investigate this possibility. As study authors Wendy Rogers and Matthew Robertson wrote in an article published by Newsweek, this violates international professional standards that say journals shouldn’t publish research that:

involves any biological material from executed prisoners
lacks human research ethics committee approval
lacks consent of donors.

However, studies that fail to meet these criteria still get published. The study examined 445 papers, which detailed more than 85,000 organ transplants, published in peer-reviewed English-language journals between 2000 and 2017, finding that:

92.5 percent of the publications didn’t say whether the transplanted organs came from executed prisoners.
99 percent didn’t say whether organ donors gave consent.
73 percent of papers received approval from an institutional ethics committee for their research.