By Professor Wendy Rogers, Associate Professor Angela Ballantyne, Wendy C Higgins, and Associate Professor Wendy Lipworth:

"Our paper in JME investigates the pros and cons of publishing and/or retracting unethical biomedical research. We focus on Chinese transplant research using organs procured from non-consenting executed prisoners. However, this is not the only topic currently raising questions about the justifiability of publishing of unethical research. Recent publication of data from Jiankui He’s widely condemned gene editing experiments has triggered vigorous debate about the probity of publication. Likewise, there are ethical concerns about publication of biometric data collected from Uyghurs living under political surveillance and repression. These contemporary examples have breathed new life into debates about how to deal with unethical research and whether publication is ever justified.

We became interested in the arguments about publishing unethical research following publication of a 2019 scoping review of transplant research conducted in China, on which two of us were authors (WR, AB). The scoping review assessed 445 published studies reporting on outcomes of 85,477 transplants. It found that 92.5% of the published papers failed to state whether or not organs were sourced from executed prisoners, while 99% failed to report whether or not organ sources gave consent for transplantation. These omissions reflect significant breaches of accepted international ethical standards that ban publication of research using material from executed prisoners."

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