Well, there’s also a third way to read it.
Perhaps the patients had IQs above 50, and thus knew they were dying a painful, hideous and unavoidable death. Perhaps they wanted something meaningful to come of their inevitable suffering and decided that by agreeing to participate in a medical experiment that was quite likely to end horribly, they could try to contribute some knowledge to the rest of humanity and the human world they were bound to leave.
But as I’ve already said, we should never let regular people make their own decisions - the ignorant fools might make a mistake. Or even be misinformed. Only an unwieldy, prestige-driven bureaucracy composed of hereditary elite physican castes should be able to decide if a dying person may sacrifice themselves for the advancement of science. Anything else would just be all higgledy-piggledy and clearly must be sanctioned harshly, perhaps by the cutting off of hands.
Edit: I’m not trying to mock you, I think you raised good points. My mockery is reserved for the medical authorities in this case.
