Article By Frank Bergman
In a bone-chilling confession, a prominent American bioethicist has admitted that patients declared “brain-dead” are being kept on life support and secretly used for medical and scientific experiments at research facilities across the United States.
Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, discussed the practice during a recent podcast.
Professor Caplan revealed that NYU Langone Health operates a research ward using the bodies of neurologically injured patients for experimentation.
Caplan referred to the patients as “neomorts” and the experimental facilities as “bioemporia.”
Satirical Warning Becomes Reality
Caplan said the terms originated in a 1974 Harper’s Magazine essay titled “Harvesting the Dead,” written by psychiatrist Willard Gaylin.
Gaylin’s article was intended as a warning about the ethical dangers created by the concept of brain death.
In the essay, Gaylin imagined facilities where neurologically injured patients could be maintained for invasive research and medical training.
“In the ensuing discussion, the word cadaver will retain its usual meaning, as opposed to the new cadaver, which will be referred to as a neomort,” Gaylin wrote.
“The ‘ward’ or ‘hospital’ in which it is maintained will be called a bioemporium …
“Whatever is possible with the old, embalmed cadaver is extended to an incredible degree with the neomort…
“Uneasy medical students could practice routine physical examinations–auscultation, percussion of the chest, examination of the retina, rectal and vaginal examinations, etc. …
“The neomort could be used for much of the testing of drugs and surgical procedures that we now normally perform on prisoners, mentally retarded children, and volunteers …
“Obvious forms of experimentation would be cures for illnesses which would first be induced in the neomort.
“We could test antidotes by injecting poison, induce cancer or virus infections to validate and compare developing therapies …”
Caplan acknowledged that Gaylin’s essay was written as a critique but said it inspired him to pursue the idea.
“He (Gaylin) was very worried that this might happen, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an idea that was wrong.”
Caplan said NYU now operates such a facility and claimed that dozens of similar programs are being established across the country to conduct drug testing and other experiments on patients declared brain-dead.
He also acknowledged that those patients are not biologically dead, describing their legal deaths as a social construct that allows their bodies to be maintained on life support.
Families Asked to Approve Experiments
The experiments are reportedly conducted on patients who had registered as organ donors but were later found unsuitable for transplantation because of infections or other medical conditions.
Families are then approached and asked whether doctors may continue life support temporarily to conduct research.
“We started by saying that it might advance transplant.
“We’re going to study something, maybe an artificial organ or some immune-suppressing drug.
“And if you give us permission — they wanted to be organ donors, but they can’t; they clearly wanted to help — let’s do it that way.
“And if the family concurred (which, reminding listeners, they don’t have to legally in an organ donation situation, but we were trying to be safe here in this idea of studying the body) if we take them for 72 hours, would you give us permission?
“And a lot of people did.”
The disclosures raise serious questions about whether families are fully informed that their loved ones remain biologically alive while being legally classified as dead.
Caplan’s support for maintaining brain-dead patients for experimentation also stands in stark contrast to his previous position in the case of Jahi McMath, a young girl whose family fought to keep her on life support after she was declared brain-dead.
At the time, Caplan wrote, “Keeping her on a ventilator amounts to the desecration of a body.”
Human Bodies Used to Test Animal Organs
Patients declared brain-dead have already been used for experiments involving genetically modified pig kidneys and livers.
Because their bodies can remain physiologically stable, researchers are able to maintain them on life support for weeks or months while studying their reactions to transplanted animal organs.
After the experiments end, life support is withdrawn, and the patients’ remains may undergo further pathological examination.
The practice has emerged as scientists have also faced criticism for proposing “bodyoids,” non-sentient human clones grown in artificial wombs for experimentation.
However, the use of patients declared brain-dead means similar research can already be performed on actual human bodies.
Gaylin warned nearly five decades ago that the claimed medical benefits of such experimentation could never erase its profound moral cost.
“And yet, after all the benefits are outlined, with the lifesaving potential clear, the humanitarian purposes obvious, the technology ready, the motives pure, and the material costs justified — how are we to reconcile our emotions?” Gaylin wrote.
“Where in this debit-credit ledger of limbs and livers and kidneys and costs are we to weigh and enter the repugnance generated by the entire philanthropic endeavor?
“Cost-benefit analysis is always least satisfactory when the costs must be measured in one realm and the benefits in another.
“The analysis is particularly skewed when the benefits are specific, material, apparent, and immediate, and the price to be paid is general, spiritual, abstract, and of the future.
“It is that which induces people to abandon freedom for security, pride for comfort, dignity for dollars …
“Sustaining life is an urgent argument for any measure, but not if that measure destroys those very qualities that make life worth sustaining.”
The revelations expose a rapidly expanding area of medical research built around human beings who remain biologically alive but have been declared legally dead.
Whatever terminology institutions use to sanitize the practice, these patients are not laboratory equipment.
They are human beings, and using their living bodies for experimentation demands immediate public scrutiny.
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