Yeah this is gross. Like the other commenter said, pretty thinly veiled excuse to freely test on humans without human consent.
Mentioning testing on a “legally dead” person (without mentioning their own prior consent, like even organ donation), then questioning why we should have empathy for things that “just look human” or “just have human DNA” is wild, to put it lightly.
MIT publishing this even as an opinion piece is signaling a pretty quick return to blatant eugenicist attitudes and using live people as lab subjects because they’re rationalized as “not really people.” Ick