Yeah this is gross. Like the other commenter said, pretty thinly veiled excuse to freely test on humans without human consent.

Mentioning testing on a “legally dead” person (without mentioning their own prior consent, like even organ donation), then questioning why we should have empathy for things that “just look human” or “just have human DNA” is wild, to put it lightly.

MIT publishing this even as an opinion piece is signaling a pretty quick return to blatant eugenicist attitudes and using live people as lab subjects because they’re rationalized as “not really people.” Ick

They just expanded Guantanamo Bay from less than 1000 cells to 30k cells, and now the propoganda articles about the benefits of human trials show up in my feed.

This has KZ written all over it.

They did a doctor who episode about this. It turned out to be a Bad Thing. I’m not sure what the deal with this trend of turning warnings into reality is, I can only assume it has something to do with who’s holding the purse strings of scientific research.

Yeah, even as a fan of biotech/synthetic biology, this gives me the heebie jeebies. I would rather serious resources be devoted to the Virtual Physiological Human Project and then have hospitals have ubiquitous dedicated bioprinters that can make organs/tissues based on genetic data from a cheek swab. Also genetic records are either temporary and needing consented reapplication or are permanent yet completely transparent about what data the hospital has and how it’s being used/stored.