Human Experimentation on prison inmates

This is a bit of a hit-or-miss subject, but hell, let's give it a shot.

What is your opinion on this topic? In my opinion, it should be allowed if the person is on death row and/or the person has a life sentence and signs a form consenting that they allow themselves to be experimented on. I mean, I see it no differently as someone testing out a new shampoo or a video game.

Maybe with signing the consent form the inmate (if they have a life sentence) can have their sentence reduced with each time they participate?

 

I think anyone, prisoner or not, can give consent to be subject to an experiment. But anyone who does not consent, prisoner or not, should never be subject to any kind of experiment.

 

From my understanding, not much could be gained from experimenting on them. One of the main reasons animals are experimented on, mice and fruit flies, for example, are because they're so inbred that any changes seen between them will be a result of the treatment, rather than genetic variation. Obviously, the same result can't be done with prisoners.

 

We breed the prisoners!

 

I can just imagine that there's an "evil genius" who does that and then doesn't realize that the kids don't stay in the prison.... Also I'm not sure about that genetic variation being toooo important, but I guess it would signal boost the result, though it might boost the wrong result...

 

How so?

 

I feel the same way as bacon on this if they consent then why not. and with the genetic variation from the different cultures and the like can give you more of an idea about side effects and how they react given difference in background and genetics, (bad example: people with blond hair and come from Hispanic descent have a 3/10 chance of having there hair fall out) i don't know like i said bad example.

 

Wrote a giant 5 paragraph explanation immediately before the server transferred and it was lost so excuse me if I'm brief...
Limiting genetic variation limits the "noise" while leading to a possible issue with overstating the effect or possibly missing the effect of a cofactor that would otherwise matter. The "noise" is due to the phenotypic differences caused by genetics and epigenetics. Say Mouse 1 has a less effective immune system than Mouse 2. If the groups are made without care to Mouse 1 and Mouse 2, the effect of the drug is obscured by the phenotype's own effect. However, it is possible that those phenotypes would lead to either the Mouse doing better than an average mouse (overstating the effect) or possibly doing worse due to a cofactor that aids the functionality. The latter tends to lead to changes in the experimental design, but the former can lead to largely inefficient drugs making it past a stage that would save them a lot of money later when the drug has lesser effects on humans than expected.
So tl:dr, when you experiment on one phenotype, you know the effect on that one phenotype. It's effect on the average phenotype may be different and you tend to want to have a larger array after the initial single phenotype test.

 

As resident mad scientist of JustDubs I think all humans, incarcerated or not, should be subject to involuntary experimentation. I must continue my quest for genetically engineered catgirls.

 

Right right right! Of course! I always forget there's more than one phenotype in things in this sense...
Perhaps use mouse clones to test basic effects, then move on to other animals, and finally on to humans? Right, lol, that's how they do do it, isn't it? XD
Btw, how'd you get your genetics knowledge?~

 

Not even other animals, it tends to be that you run it through a variety of different mice after it, but sometimes that doesn't happen and it makes me sad because mice trials are less expensive than human trials. I'd prefer if they did go through a different animal rather than go straight to humans, but mammals much larger than mice have quite a few more stringent laws... Trust me, I've talked to people at one of the biggest chimp labs in the country (Yerkes).
Graduated from Emory in Biology. Thought everyone knew that....

 

Forgot to tag you in above.
To talk about the original post, truthfully you could argue that any consent given would be under coercion and thus inadmissable in a court of law. The laws on human studies have largely been quite rigid since the Nuremberg code was released and scandals in the 1960s and 70s caused ethics committees to be formed.

 

I had looked at going in to genetics myself at one stage. (doing things along the line of genethropy to alter ones DNA)
or giving the ability to flight to the normal human, just have to finger out that 6 limb genome first.

 

And the fact that our bones weigh too much. And the fact that our forms would be super ungraceful. And the fact that you'd need to double the blood supply, increase our lung size, metabolism, find a way to get all of those changes onto our dna while allowing such beings to not be sterile. Chances are you'd need to do that procedure quite a few times on embryos in order to make a suitable stock. They'd need to be embryos because otherwise your immune system would almost assuredly freak out and kill the wing's tissue. Also find a way so that the wings have feathers but the rest of the person doesn't (imaginal discs? Baby could be born without wings and have a trigger to develop them in childhood/puberty. That'd solve the issues that such thin connections might break during birth). Chances are I'd say that getting the mesoderm and exoderm to lay out right would take quite a bit of tweaking....
So what I'm trying to say by being a total party pooper is, we don't have spliced creatures of such specific nature because doing so requires almost superhuman levels of manipulation of structure and function. I'd expect we find eternal life before we find such things because eternal life at least has a number of candidates that we can knock out piecemeal (eliminating cancer by finding an effective binding agent that kills cancer stem cells, finding a cheap effective way to clean arteries so that you can just go in for a day and come out with a clean heart, being able to create a heart from stem cells that is functioning and perfectly compatible with its host in a series of days, body backups in case of accidents etc.) as opposed to anything beyond adding a chemical to ourselves like most biotech currently is.
It's fun playing with thought experiments though.

 

Ah, that is sad...
Oh, nice~ I'm planning to at least have a minor in genetics for my Bachelor of Science~

Haha, the pains of having a knowledge in science. XD