ArticleAmerican journal of transplantation : official journal of the American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons2022
Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China.
Article in American journal of transplantation : official journal of the American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Legal Framework on Organ Donation and Transplantation in China.Transplantation · 2026Article
- Implementing large language model and retrieval augmented generation to extract geographic locations of illicit transnational kidney trade.International journal of health geographics · 2025Article
- Japanese Perception of Organ Donation and Implications for New Medical Technologies: Quantitative and Qualitative Social Media Analyses.JMIR formative research · 2024Article
- Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China.American journal of transplantation : official journal of the American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so, and by the same token, that procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor. In a separate area of medical practice, there has been intense controversy around the participation of physicians in the execution of capital prisoners. These two apparently disparate topics converge in a unique case: the intimate involvement of transplant surgeons in China in the execution of prisoners via the procurement of organs. We use computational text analysis to conduct a forensic review of 2838 papers drawn from a dataset of 124 770 Chinese-language transplant publications. Our algorithm searched for evidence of problematic declarations of brain death during organ procurement. We find evidence in 71 of these reports, spread nationwide, that brain death could not have properly been declared. In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor's death. Because these organ donors could only have been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People's Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.
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Registered trials
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