In practice, how does one balance the responsibility both to science and to the dead?
A good example is the effort over the last couple years to investigate flu virus samples from past pandemics. With the rise of novel influenza virus strains spreading around the world, scientists became very interested in studying the genome of the infamous 1918-19 flu virus that caused the most deadly pandemic in human history. The obvious place to get it was from the remains of people who died of it. Two different teams took two different approaches. One hunted for the virus in a huge collection of preserved tissue samples kept by the Centers for Disease Control and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The tissues all have been rendered anonymous, to protect the privacy and family histories of descendants. Of course, consent isn’t always clear, as we didn’t start asking for consent until recently. But to me, in this case, the medical and public health value of the project easily overrode qualms about consent from an anonymous person. Meanwhile, another group had the idea to go to
