The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN) recently issued an “Expression of Concern” regarding a 2008 article on renal allograft recipients written by Chinese researchers.
The Expression of Concern stems from an Australian report published online in February in BMJ Open, which urged the repudiation by English-language journals of more than 445 studies involving 85,477 organ transplants done in China. The reason? Many of the organs used were likely forcibly harvested from Chinese prisoners of conscience, such as practitioners of Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and underground Christians.
“We reached out for clarification of the organ source to the senior authors, but one was deceased and the other had left the institution where the research was done,” said CJASN Editor-in-Chief Rajnish Mehrotra, MD, MBBS, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles.
