On which, the Mengele-level gruesome Japanese experments on civilians and POWs, or how the post-war governments of Japan and the US gave them a pass?
Here’s an interview with one of those “pardoned doctors” who participated in the actions of the Japanese Unit 731 and other similar Units set up all around the occupied areas of China.
Pretty sharp contrast to how the Nazis were handled.
Not really. In regards to Germany, there was Operation Paperclip, where the US found and imported German scientists, including Huburtus Strughold, who experimented on prisoners at Dachau, Kurt Blome, who did plague experiments at Auschwitz, and Werner von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, who built rockets with concentration camp slave labor.
Matt, thanks for your catch. I misremembered what I had read in a NYTimes article. I just found and reread the piece (Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity, March 17, 1995).
Burn treatment was not mentioned. It was the proper treatment for frostbite that was developed by the Japanese researchers. The investigators found that immersing the frozen tissue into water between 100 - 122 degrees was better than the traditional method of rubbing the area.
My apolologies for posting with a leaky memory.
My old man was a research physician on altitude medicine for the whole of the 1970s with the RAF, and he told me that yes indeed, they did use some Nazi data, after a lot of heated debate. The upshot of the ethics was “we use other ghastly human tragedies to make things better for humanity, and despite the inhuman source of these data, they are unrepeatable anywhere else, and never will be.”
Well, neither of those two, but how the US “used Japanese germ-warfare results” was what I was after, calm down.
There’s a couple of chapters on this in Ed Regis’ The Biology of Doom. According to that, as I remember, a lot of the Unit 731 data wasn’t particularly useful, either. (Unscientifically collected; or stuff we’d already learned or progressed beyond ourselves, etc.) :smack:
I see what you’re saying. But I can’t help but feel that there’s some validity to the ‘heard’ comments. Frankly - I really, really have no desire to read the “studies” that the Nazis did. So, I’m afraid I’m another one of those people passing on a hearsay allegation.
I do believe that there’s an amount of data that was gotten from the Nazis experiments with radiation exposure. Specifically, what I’d been told was that there was an attempt to see what dose could be used to ‘sterilize’ lesser races without actually letting them realize they’d been exposed to such levels of radiation. The upshot for their experiments was that enough of a dose to really scramble the sperm would push the victim into LD50 range. Not exactly a stealth sterilization technique. And some of that data has been used for determining safe radiation doses for workers.
I can’t offer you a cite - I never went looking far enough into the specific data used to support the various limits to get into the source data. (And not being a student at a university, the sources I can find online are a bit limited.)
I would say that in one case, it is at least possible and that such a charge has been reasonably been leveled but you need to understand that it is no slam dunk that this happened – it is controversial:
From the 30’s thru the 90’s there were really only 2 standards for advanced anatomy textbooks. “Gray’s Anatomy” being one and “Pernkopf’s Anatomy” the other. There was no doubt the Pernkopf, a Vienna U guy, had been about as big a Nazi as you could be & not be hung. That fact never affected the acceptance of his work. In the 90’s a charge, in letter to JAMA, was leveled that his work was based – at least a part of it from the 40’s – on pictures & drawings based on concentration camp victims.
The Austrian Government & Vienna U investigated the charge and said (essentially but using this %) that they were 99% certain that Pernkopf did not use Holocaust victims in his research.
However the controversy surrounding it never really went away (some ’30-‘40’s editions of the book were festooned with swastika’s and SS bolts, trully he went the whole 9 yards) & it becomes hard to separate Pernkopf from his work which undoubtedly did advance medical knowledge in the training of 3 generations of physicians, and his politics - he more or less led the purge of Jews from Vienna U in the late 30’s, even before the Anschluss he was a BIG Nazi & major Hitler fan.
So there is a small chance and, (if we don’t think Vienna U and the Austrian Government are whitewashing,) that chance can be quantified as 1%, that in this case, that the answer to the OP is “yes”.
It’s a tough dillema when you say you don’t want to read the details (which I can understand) but want to speculate about what the details are. That’s why it’s tough to put this subject to rest. I’ve read some of the transcripts from the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, and the books I referenced above. It’s my conclusion that aside from the obvious ethical problems, the so-called “experiments” were really just sadistic exercises. Nothing about them qualifies as science, not even gruesomely inhumane science.
Here are a couple of readily available sources, none of which are goulishly graphic in their descriptions. (IMHO).
The Jewish Virtual Library has some good details on each of the “experiments”, including links to and excerpts from source documents.
JohnCorrado offered a link above that has a pretty good overview and discusses the scientific validity of the experiments.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibit, which includes trasnscripts from Nuremberg. Some of this is probably more detail than you’re comfortable with, but mush of it is not.
Slight hijack: Star Trek Voyager had an episode which focused on this very question. IIRC, the EMH (holographic ship’s doctor) wrestles with his conscience before deciding to learn from the useful but barbarously-obtained medical data of a Cardassian researcher.
I am not sure if this is a valid connection to the original question, but here is a link to a book review of “The Nazi War on Cancer”
http://www.haciendapub.com/iol4.html
Evidently, one of the things that the Nazi’s discovered in thier research was a direct link between cigarette smoking and cancer, and there was an all out effort to eliminate smoking in the Third Reich.
soxfan59
The cancer research that soxfan59 refers to is o utside the scope of what we’re talking about. Certainly, there was legitimate scientific research being conducted in Germany during the Nazi reign. But when we’re talking about the Nazi “medical experiments”, we’re specifically refering to the program run by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, and by other doctors at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps.
Yeah, but at the end…
[spoiler]They decide that, in the interests of morality, they had to delete all the data obtained by that researcher…including the (seemingly self-aware) hologram of the researcher himself, who’d they’d created to help out with the medical emergency they’d been facing.
A hologram who, because knowledge of his war crimes wasn’t publicly known, had been created without the memories or knowledge of what his real-life prototype had done.
So, basically, to make an ethical stand against genocide and medical torture…the crew summarily executes a man solely for the crimes his “parent” had commited, and to keep their society pure of “evil” information.
Yeah, that’s the right thing to do. Way to go, starfleet. :smack: :rolleyes: [/spoiler]
I hope I don’t have to explain in any detail how horrific these “experiments” were! Can we just take that as read?
But it is a fact that some of these monstrous “experiments” put people into conditions that we simply cannot and must not ever repeat. Thus, whatever scraps of information we were able to pick up have scientific value, even though most of these “experiments” weren’t what anyone today would call “scientific”. On the other hand, only a relatively small amount of the valuable information we have absorbed about the real world comes from applying the proper scientific method. Should we throw out that information, too? Unscientific doesn’t mean absent of potentially valuable information, it just means that information should not be considered reliable.
Now I’m the first to question the ethics of using this information, but that’s not what the OP asked.
Let me raise a few points… Several posters have downplayed the hypothermia data as either unscientific, distorted, or fabricated (not to mention inhumane and evil; do I need to keep on saying that?) However, real scientists, such as Robert Pozos at the University of Minnesota reported that the data were indeed valuable, especially since the Nazis cooled their “subjects” to incredibly low levels that can never be the subject of ethical scientific research today! Pozos couldn’t justify lowering his subjects core temperature below 95 degrees, but the Nazis lowered their core temps to below 80 degrees F! These were priceless data! (however vile and repugnant the source) And contrary to the claims here that that data were fabricated, Dr. Pozos, John Hayward, and others say otherwise and insist they were indeed valuable to their work. See: Katz, Jay and Robert S. Pozos, “The Dachau Hypothermia Study: An Ethical and Scientific Commentary”, in When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust, Arthur Caplan, ed.
And here is what an EPA manager said regarding the regulation of the use of phosgene gas which relied on the use of Nazi concentration camp atrocities and mass murder during the Holocaust: “We felt compelled to use [the data]”, even though it was flawed, because they had no ethical source for the information. Sadly, the outcry was too great and they were forced to discard the data, regardless of how many lives it would have saved!
So why should we discard whatever data we can garner, no matter how globally unreliable and unscientific, since we can never, ever put subjects into those conditions again? Now, I can deeply respect the viewpoint of those who find the method of gathering these data so unutterably abhorrent and evil that they should never be used no matter what. But I cannot agree with it. These people died horrible, horrible deaths and if there’s even a chance that anything of value can be taken away from that we have a moral obligation to do so. I think a fair (if difficult to manage) method of determining what data should be explored is to ask permission from the families and letting them decide.
Off to Great Debates, I imagine…
Hello, SoxFan59 – good to see you here again. I hope to encounter you again in a cheerier thread.
First off, I’ll confess that, regarding this issue, I’m one of those with nothing but ‘what I’ve heard.’ I don’t have the stomach for deeper research on the subject. That said, I tend towards agreement with ambushed – that using any useful data would be more respectful to the victims than wasting it.
Secondly, I’ll furthur confess that I do have a dog in the fight. 19 years ago, when my daughter was born 3 months prematurely, very sick and requiring a lot of high tech medical intervention to survive, I was told that much of preemie medical care had been developed using Nazi research on babies whose premature birth had been induced. I don’t know if this is true – my daughter’s birth and early days were traumatic enough for me that I generally avoid research on prematurity – I lack the stomach for that too. Still I’m stuck with the long-time suspicion that me and mine have benefited from these terrible experiements… I suppose I justify this by feeling that using the data (if any) for good means that the victims will not have totally died in vain. 