Is it right to use Nazi research if it can save lives?

Pedro_P

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From the Apollo rockets to new drugs to treat HIV, some scientific advances are obtained in dubious ways. Should we make peace with using their findings?


▼ Seeking a local angle on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landings this week, Washington DC news station WTOP published a glowing biography of the “brilliant” rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was laid to rest in nearby Alexandria in 1977. The article caused uproar, however, and was swiftly retracted. The reason? It had failed to mention that von Braun was a Nazi.
There are few corners of scientific progress that are not tainted at some point in their history by immoral or unethical behaviour. Physics, biology, zoology, medicine, psychology, vaccine science, anthropology, genetics, nutrition, engineering: all are rife with discoveries made in circumstances that can be described as unethical, even illegal. How should we feel about making use of that knowledge? Especially when it could be of great service to civilisation and even save lives?
Von Braun’s presence on the Apollo programme was no outlier. More than 120 German scientists and engineers joined him there, including fellow SS officer Kurt Debus (who became director of Nasa's Launch Operations Center) and Bernhard Tessmann (designer of the colossal Vertical Assembly Building at what is now Kennedy Space Center).
They were among 1,600 scientists recruited by spies as part of  Operation Paperclip at the end of  World War Two– all shielded from prosecution, given safe passage to the US, and allowed to continue their work.
Allied forces also snapped up other Nazi innovations. Nerve agents such as Tabun and Sarin (which would fuel the development of new insecticides as well as weapons of mass destruction), the antimalarial chloroquine, methadone and methamphetamines, as well as medical research into hypothermia, hypoxia, dehydration and more, were all generated on the back of human experiments in concentration camps.
Particleboard, forms of synthetic rubber and the soft drink Fantawere also developed by the Germans under Nazi rule.
But this was far from a one-off injection of unethical research into the scientific record. For 40 years, starting in 1932, researchers at Tuskegee University in Alabama tracked the  progress of syphilis in hundreds  of poor black men– none of whom were ever given a diagnosis or treatment, despite the antibiotic penicillin, which could cure the disease, being available at the time.
In a related study, US doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected unsuspecting patients with sexually transmitted infections to study the diseases. Conscious of the outcry this might generate, the experiments were performed  in Guatemala.
US doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected unsuspecting patients with sexually transmitted infections to study the diseases
From 1955 to 1976, in what became known as “The Unfortunate Experiment”, hundreds of women with  pre-cancerous lesions were left  untreatedto see if they developed cervical cancer. Details of the study only came to light following an expose by two women’s health advocates Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle. The New Zealand study hoped to test theories about the value of early intervention, but a later inquiry into the research by judge Silvia Cartwright criticised the treatment of patients by the doctors running the study.
The polio vaccine – and many other medical advances besides – owes its existence to human cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent, and who never saw any compensation from their commercialisation. The cell line grown from those initial samples have been used in countless research into drugs, toxins,  viruses and also have been used  to study the human genome.
And in the 1950s, Robert G Heath pioneered the use of electrodes implanted in the brain, in one case attempting to rewire sexual orientation. Today similar technology is used as a treatment for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and Elon Musk’s recently-announced neural lace.
It is not controversial to argue that these experiments should never have happened. But now they have, what should be done with the information they generated?
“The basic intuition is that if information had been obtained unethically, but we use that information, then we then become complicit in that past,” says Dom Wilkinson, a medical ethicist at the University of Oxford. This is a common view, even among those who make use of such findings.
Writing in the bioethics journal The Hastings Centre Report in 1984, Kristine Moe recounts a  conversation with John Hayward, a leading expert in hypothermia at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who used Nazi data in his studies. “I don't want to have to use this data, but there is no other and will be no other in an ethical world,” he told her. “I've rationalised it a little bit. But to not use it would be equally bad.”
But Hayward’s experience was unusual.
“I think it’s important to say that these findings very rarely provide key important information in isolation,” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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parivijesh100

Life is most important in the sense that once life is there then only anything can start even good one.

themaskeditor

Well research that is good for mankind could be used regardless of the inventor.

Anyways most of the modern technology that in used in fighter jets, space rockets modern weapons has been derived from the nazi's. Is is a well known fact that after the defeat of the Nazi the American and the Russians harnessed their technologies.

Every person has a different perspective that creates different opinions.

asr335704

As long as, the research is beneficial to humans and it can save lives, it should be totally fine to use the research. Saving lives is the most important thing.

KH_Hirsch

Just to clarify, Nazi scientists experimented with POW inmates on how to survive in ice cold oceans when being shot down in a fighter plane. Let alone all the other experiments on why and how races differ. There are clearly boundaries of what's acceptable and re-use of results seem to create a value for experiments which should never have happened in the first place.

On Wernher von Braun and the collection of his previous scientific results whether created by him or others it seems to be that if these results feed well into the war machinery everything is acceptable. Having utilised and accepting the death of hundreds of POW in the development of V1 and V2 rockets was an outrageous attrocity which needs to be named in the same sentence; over and over again.