The reason medical progress is so slow is largely the types of people who, when they hear a woman cured her own cancer and published the results to benefit others, heroically advancing the cause of humanity at risk to only herself, warn of the dire ethical problems with that.
Often those people call themselves ‘ethicists.’ No, seriously, that is a thing, and that situation somehow rose to the level of a writeup in Nature, which calls self-experimentation an ‘ethically fraught practice.’
I’m as contemptuous as anyone of most ‘bioethics’, but this does gloss over the main objection. From the Nature News article (non-paywalled version):
That journals had concerns doesn’t surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to COVID-19 vaccines.
The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Yet, he notes, it’s also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn’t lost.
In other words, the ethically fraught part is not the self-experimentation per se but promulgating what she did. There is a real risk that publication would, at the margin, increase the chances of somebody trying to do the same thing (or much more likely, a misunderstood and mangled version) and ending up harming themselves, either directly or indirectly by missing out on conventional treatment. I don’t think what she did was wrong, but I also don’t think it can be denied that there are genuine ethical considerations here. Calling for additional commentary seems like a pretty level-headed response.
I’m as contemptuous as anyone of most ‘bioethics’, but this does gloss over the main objection. From the Nature News article (non-paywalled version):
In other words, the ethically fraught part is not the self-experimentation per se but promulgating what she did. There is a real risk that publication would, at the margin, increase the chances of somebody trying to do the same thing (or much more likely, a misunderstood and mangled version) and ending up harming themselves, either directly or indirectly by missing out on conventional treatment. I don’t think what she did was wrong, but I also don’t think it can be denied that there are genuine ethical considerations here. Calling for additional commentary seems like a pretty level-headed response.