Australian National University, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Washington, D.C., USA.
Heart Transplantation Unit, Leviev Cardiothoracic Center, Sheba Medical Center, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Gan, Israel.
Am J Transplant. 2022 Jul;22(7):1804-1812. doi: 10.1111/ajt.16969. Epub 2022 Apr 4.
The dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so, and by the same token, that procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor. In a separate area of medical practice, there has been intense controversy around the participation of physicians in the execution of capital prisoners. These two apparently disparate topics converge in a unique case: the intimate involvement of transplant surgeons in China in the execution of prisoners via the procurement of organs. We use computational text analysis to conduct a forensic review of 2838 papers drawn from a dataset of 124 770 Chinese-language transplant publications. Our algorithm searched for evidence of problematic declarations of brain death during organ procurement. We find evidence in 71 of these reports, spread nationwide, that brain death could not have properly been declared. In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor's death. Because these organ donors could only have been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People's Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.
死亡供者准则是移植伦理学的基本原则。该准则规定，只有在供者已经死亡并经过正式宣告后，才能开始进行器官获取，同样地，获取器官也绝不能导致供者死亡。在医学实践的另一个领域，医生参与死刑犯执行的问题一直存在激烈的争议。这两个看似截然不同的话题在一个独特的案例中交汇：中国的移植外科医生通过获取器官，密切参与对囚犯的处决。我们使用计算文本分析对从 124770 篇中文移植文献数据集中抽取的 2838 篇论文进行了法医审查。我们的算法搜索了器官获取过程中有关脑死亡有问题声明的证据。我们在全国范围内的 71 份报告中发现了证据，表明脑死亡不可能得到正确的宣告。在这些情况下，在器官获取过程中心脏的移除肯定是供者死亡的直接原因。由于这些器官捐献者只能是囚犯，我们的发现强烈表明，中华人民共和国的医生参与了通过器官摘取执行死刑。
