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89 points Michelangelo11 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.499s | source
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alwa ◴[] No.44522167[source]
Bizarre that this category of touring show continues after all these years. It seems like such self-consciously guilty behavior on the part of the organizers: you don’t accidentally end up with human corpses (that you’re selling as entertainment on the basis of being human corpses!).

They came by them somehow. If the nature of someplace’s justice system is that a death sentence comes with a “turned-to-plastic-and-paraded-around-for-selfies” enhancement, so as to trouble the offender’s eternal soul as well as their life, then just.. say that. “They’re ’bad guys’ and we as a company believe that’s what bad guys deserve.” Or even, “we weren’t involved in the circumstances of their death, but we figure if we’d had a chance to ask them they probably would be fine with it.”

As morally repugnant as I find the entire endeavor, I bet it wouldn’t even hurt ticket sales: people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions.

But like, there’s a right way to do informed consent—why not just do it and say “yeah we did it the obvious way”? Come to think of it… the ambiguity sure is a reliable path to free attention. It wouldn’t be the first marketing strategy to rely on provocation…

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toast0 ◴[] No.44522273[source]
The visible human project[1] at least has some consent, although it may not have been full and uncoerced.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Human_Project

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1. OldfieldFund ◴[] No.44523392[source]
I wonder what "informed consent" truly entails. When someone donates their body "to science," they are likely picturing anonymous dissection in a medical school lab for the benefit of students.
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2. fhdkweig ◴[] No.44524223[source]
Sometimes they are just used to test bombs.

"A body donated to science - but used to test bombs" 6 August 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49198405

3. toast0 ◴[] No.44525160[source]
I would think informed consent would include some specific categories relating to how the body may be used, and specific approval or disapproval of those; then actually following through on those uses, and if there's no need for a body for those uses, either returning it to the estate or disposing of it through burial or cremation as per the wishes of the donor.

When donor bodies get used in ways that weren't generally practiced when donated and weren't specifically consented to, that's almost certainly not informed consent, even if there is a blanket consent 'to science'. IMHO, being exhibited in novel ways is fine if it's specifically consented to, but not otherwise. Especially in cases where the body was preserved for many years and then a novel use is made, it seems like you'd need new and specific consent, which maybe you can obtain from the estate, but certainly not from the donor.