Interesting post, but no I mean the ethical guidelines and standards of the journal. I suspect that the scientists treat them like people treat EULAs - they make assumptions about what is in there and often don't actually read them unless someone rejects their paper because of the guidelines.
My grandfather was a career medical researcher and medical school founder, with a career spanning heart surgery, kidney transplant pioneering, to blood diseases, and pulmonary systems. He had hundreds of papers published, hundreds of patents, and published until he died in his 80s. In my experience he was very well versed in the ethical standards for medical research, sat on the human research standards boards, and oversaw likely thousands of graduate students. My belief from existing in his orbit and sitting in his labs most my summers growing up was people were very concerned about the ethics of human research. I think generally the culture of biomedical research tends to reject people who aren’t from the field, and journals tend to hold fairly uniform standards that are pretty broadly agreed upon. I don’t think the researchers in question here were ambiguous as to whether forced or coerced consent to genetic forensic research is ethical or not. It was just convenient and didn’t require sourcing subjects and engaging with them sufficient to gain positive informed consent. People that traffic in slave labor goods are almost certainly aware it’s considered wrong, people who traffic in forced medical research also know it’s considered wrong. It’s not the same as skipping through a ten thousand page boilerplate of garbage.
It's very weird that you seem to have such faith in the so called reputable journals, and speak in such a seemingly elitist tone, at a time where the "replication crisis" and in general academic fraud is so well known.
Oh I don’t have faith in journals to be flawless, and I think the peer review system implies a lot more than it delivers. However it is the system, and there are well intentioned reasons behind a lot of it. But the replication crisis isn’t a flaw to me it’s a feature. Peer review isn’t a substitute for replication and the fact things are being discovered in replication as fraudulent sounds like the way science is supposed to work.
