Human beings, regardless of how sick they are, shouldn’t be considered less worthy of protection.

When assisted suicide/euthanasia is legalized, people who are eligible to be killed because they are seriously ill may become objectified by their societies. For example, they may be thought of as so many organ farms to be harvested after their lives are ended.

Such objectification of the sick can be infectious. In California, there is a new research program called Last Gift that seeks people with “life-shortening” conditions who also have HIV to be experimented on — not to find cures or ways to extend their lives, but to better understand the virus. From the Last Gift research subject solicitation:

UC San Diego is looking for altruistic people with HIV, who have been diagnosed with a life-shortening disease and reside in San Diego County. The Last Gift tissue donation research study aims to understand the behavior of HIV in the human body — giving scientists the rare opportunity to learn where the virus hides in an individual and inspire medical advancements for generations to come.

I think it is worth noticing that Anthony Fauci’s old outfit, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a funder of the program.

The rank utilitarian Peter Singer is thrilled with the concept. From his article “A Meaningful Last Gift for All Sentient Beings” (my emphasis):

At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a program called Last Gift offers terminally ill patients the opportunity to help create more effective treatments. Their special circumstances transform the usual risk-benefit calculus of joining a clinical study of an untested drug. Researchers can ask them to consider consenting to being research participants in ways that they would not ask healthier people with long life expectancies, and terminally ill patients may choose to give that consent when others would be less likely to do so.

Wait a darn minute. Singer seems to be saying that the lives of people diagnosed with a terminal illness are less important than those of healthier people. But why should life expectancy matter in determining whether an experiment on human beings is ethical?

Moreover, the Last Gift solicitation doesn’t refer to terminally ill people but to those with “life-shortening” conditions, which isn’t the same thing. Nor does it say that the subjects will be taking curative experimental medicines to determine whether these are efficacious. It is already ethical to engage in such experimentation, and right-to-try laws permit the dying to receive drugs to attempt cures before these are approved.

Singer provides disturbing details not found on the Last Gift web page:

Participants in this study are infected with HIV as well as being terminally ill. They don’t just donate their bodies for research to be conducted after their death; they also participate in invasive procedures while still alive, including biopsies, spinal taps, and blood draws.

If such invasive procedures would be deemed unethical for the healthy regardless of consent, then it should be considered wrong to so experiment on the sick.

The next step of the plan is even worse:

The research does not need to be in an area related to the participant’s illness. For example, a person with advanced cancer might volunteer for a trial of a vaccine for an infectious viral disease. The trial will involve deliberate exposure to the virus, to test whether the vaccine offers protection.

Are we really going to allow that?

Singer supports the protocol because he believes that it entails fewer animal research subjects:

Productive medical research partnerships with the dying can save human lives, and at the same time add meaning to the last days of terminally ill patients. Initiatives like Last Gift have the potential to benefit all sentient beings — humans and animals.

I guess we should just throw away the Nuremberg Code and the Common Rule that — as a matter of protecting human rights — requires some animal testing before experimenting on people. (Of course, we should find ethical means to reduce the need for using animals, such as computer models and tissue lines.) These ethical rules were intended to protect all human subjects, not just some. Human beings, regardless of how sick they are or how long they are expected to live, should never be considered less worthy of protection than are animals.