Well no, it doesn't mean this. It means testing a treatment that's still highly experimental and a long way from being approved. In other words, a treatment that is in the EARLY stages of its development (in the normal English sense of the term). Listening again to the relevant portion of the interview, I think the claim that the interviewee was using 'early' to mean 'whatever the FDA regards as early' is pretty clearly false. They say 'we can't do early stage testing on humans because the FDA bans it', but that obviously doesn't mean that they define the meaning of 'early' by FDA regulations. That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".
>Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical?
No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?
If that's the definition, then that doesn't sound evil to me. It doesn't sound like informed consent is impossible.
Also I feel like that definition includes lots of existing allowed clinical trials.
> That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".
What's the thing similar to murder that is allowed? The equivalent of "FDA approved middle-stage testing"? Otherwise this analogy falls apart half-constructed.
> No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?
Well the word murder does work that way. Something being murder often depends on whether it's ethical or not. If it's ethical self defense then it's not murder, for example.
So you don't need to get upset that I asked just in case.
It's impossible because the risks are largely unknown, so there's nothing much to be informed about. Anyone who wants to take on such unknown and potentially enormous risks is probably acting irrationallty, and it's unethical to exploit such people.
But this is where we get to the "written in blood part". The history of medicine is full of cases of people being horribly exploited in early stage testing. That's why we have the rules. Not because of abstract arguments about informed consent, but because we've seen what happens if we don't. It's all very well to imagine people giving informed consent to this sort of testing and imagine scientists acting responsibly and ethically in this sort of scenario; but we know that this isn't actually what happens.
>What's the thing similar to murder that is allowed? The equivalent of "FDA approved middle-stage testing"? Otherwise this analogy falls apart half-constructed.
The point of the analogy is simply to show that "the rules ban X" doesn't entail "the meaning of 'X' is defined by the rules". So e.g. if someone says "I don't fish in this lake because the rules ban it", that doesn't mean that they take the verb 'fish' to be defined by the rules in question. The same goes for FDA rules and 'early stage testing on humans'.
Well that's just it. If 'early' is automatically bad, and 'early' just means anything not currently allowed, then you're using the FDA's definition.
Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical? That's definitely not the meaning of 'early' the neurosurgeon was using!!
The neurosurgeon wants to do 'early'. But 'early' is a vast swath of scenarios, covering orders of magnitude of safety and preparedness. Which is why I think using very extreme examples does more harm than good to having a conversation about this.
I don't think letting people sign up to do a test moderately earlier than they currently can is a huge ethical problem. Even if we assume it's a bad idea, it's not Evil. That's my real objection to the original point. A medium-size change to current regulations is nowhere near "capital E Evil".
I don't think we need to have exact discussions about where the line is, my point is that the great-whatever parent was assuming some kind of crazy extreme and acting like that was the only possible meaning for the sentence. And my asking them where the line is was a way of trying to make that clear, that they're neglecting more mundane scenarios.