Lady Gaga's fiancé, Michael Polansky, runs a company that takes discarded human skin (mostly from plastic surgery), keeps it alive for a month so they can test cosmetics on it

From the article:

Asked about the donors’ privacy, he says that every sample arrives already de-identified — stripped upstream by the supplying organizations of names, contact information and other direct identifiers.

I assume they don't collect the DNA profiles, and after the skin dies it's probably disposed of via incineration.

And unlike animals this isn’t just similar to humans this is from an actual human

There is an ethics class debate about this involving a woman named Henrietta Lacks.

She had cells taken from her body without being asked. They were used to create the first immortal human cells, called HeLa cells. These concepts go into things like informed consent.

Yes that was my concern! My instinct is this sounds great, but if they're scalping prisoners or running exploitative practises to get skin from under privileged people then uh oh

It seems unlikely to me, but fucking hell in this world, idek anymore

Honestly this is the problem with a lot of human based testing over animal testing. Like yes we should move away from animal testing where we can, but a lot of human based testing is unethical in one way or another. 

That’s a valid concern, but the fault for that would lie with the sourcing company and not Outer-Bio.

Exactly. I have my concerns and they aren't unfounded.

It’s relevant here because she’s listed as a member of the Board of his company on one of the slides. 

that's disgusting. thank you for that information

IRB oversight is what you need before any clinical trial involving humans. I’ve run several clinical trials but with much much lower stakes interventions! IRB is the first step before you get things up and running, and is there to make sure you’re following rules and are properly protecting human subjects. They take that very seriously- I’ve spent a literal year going around with IRB to try and get a project started.

Before that though, the NIH has a lot of their own rules and regulations that are implemented to keep people safe. To even get a grant you need to show exactly how you’re going to do the research and there may be recommendations to change things if thought necessary. Big grants are chosen by peers and a slightly convoluted (imo) ranking system.

After being chosen for a grant, they will have a NIH program officer that is assigned to the project who is responsible for monitoring their progress and making sure everything is in order. Depending on who gives funding and the working style of the PO, I’ve had occasional check ins when things are happening, with emails between, to weekly meetings.

Now, that doesn’t automatically mean everything is all peachy and on the up and up - there’s self reporting that you’d need to do, and while there are audits, they’re random and may not catch anything. But that’s like a worst case scenario and I’ve never known anyone to be deceitful or improper with this funding.

It’s an enormous privilege to get a large NIH grant, and those I’ve worked with all take the responsibility very seriously. I work in public health research by the way. I also write this half dazed after I woke up from a nap, and this is very much not my area of work, so anyone please correct me if I’m wrong or missed something!

I already know what Miss “I fucking love you Israel” is about

Technically not just Palestinians.

But it’s uh, still quite bad.

“Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer."
Hiss said: "We started to harvest corneas ... whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."
However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. “

EXCUSE ME?! SKIN?!?

thank you for noting this as well. this must be amplified.

Rats, rabbits, mice, chimpanzees, dogs, other primates, cats etc etc

How do you follow the chain back to source and guarantee it’s ethical if the identity has been stripped?

speaking as a godless european communist, comrade, i agree