Results of Death Camp Experiments: Should They Be Used?????

1
Results of Death Camp ExperimentsShould They
Be Used?????
2
Background Information

• Nazi doctors conducted as many as 30 different
  types of experiments of concentration camp
  inmates.
• They did these without consent of the victims who
  suffered indescribable pain, mutilation,
  permanent disability, or in the case of
  manydeath.

3
Experiments

• High Altitude
• Freezing
• Sulfanilamide
• Twins
• Poison
• Tuberculosis
• Phosgene
• Bone, Muscle, Joint Transplants
• Seawater

4
High Altitude

• In 1942, Sigmund Rascher and others conducted
  high-altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau.
  Eager to find out how best to save German pilots
  forced to eject at high altitude, they placed
  inmates into low-pressure chambers that simulated
  altitudes as high as 68,000 feet and monitored
  their physiological response as they succumbed
  and died. Rascher was said to dissect victims'
  brains while they were still alive to show that
  high-altitude sickness resulted from the
  formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood
  vessels of a certain part of the brain. Of 200
  people subjected to these experiments, 80 died
  outright and the remainder were executed.

5
Freezing

• To determine the most effective means for
  treating German pilots who had become severely
  chilled from ejecting into the ocean, or German
  soldiers who suffered extreme exposure on the
  Russian front, Rascher and others conducted
  freezing experiments at Dachau. For up to five
  hours at a time, they placed victims into vats of
  icy water, either in aviator suits or naked they
  took others outside in the freezing cold and
  strapped them down naked. As the victims writhed
  in pain, foamed at the mouth, and lost
  consciousness, the doctors measured changes in
  the patients' heart rate, body temperature,
  muscle reflexes, and other factors. When a
  prisoner's internal body temperature fell to
  79.7F, the doctors tried rewarming him using hot
  sleeping bags, and scalding baths. Some 80 to 100
  patients perished during these experiments

6
Sulfanilamide

• For the benefit of the German Army, whose
  frontline soldiers suffered greatly from gas
  gangrene, a type of progressive gangrene, doctors
  at the Ravensbruck concentration camp performed
  studies to test the effectiveness of
  sulfanilamide and other drugs in curbing such
  infections. They inflicted battlefield-like
  wounds in victims, then infected the wounds with
  bacteria such as streptococcus, tetanus, and gas
  gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting
  infection by rubbing ground glass and wood
  shavings into the wound, and they tied off blood
  vessels on either side of the injury to simulate
  what would happen to an actual war wound. Victims
  suffered intense agony and serious injury, and
  some of them died as a result.

7
Twins

• In an effort to find ways to more effectively
  multiply the German race, Dr. Josef Mengele
  performed experiments on twins at Auschwitz in
  hopes of plumbing the secrets of multiple births.
  After taking all the body measurements and other
  living data he could from selected twins, Mengele
  and his collaborators dispatched them with a
  single injection of chloroform to the heart. Of
  about 1,000 pairs of twins experimented upon,
  only about 200 pairs survived.

8
Poison

• Researchers at Buchenwald concentration camp
  developed a method of individual execution by
  injecting Russian prisoners with phenol and
  cyanide. Experimenters also tested various
  poisons on the human body by secreting noxious
  chemicals in prisoners' food or shooting inmates
  with poison bullets. Victims who did not die
  during these experiments were killed to allow the
  experimenters to perform autopsies

9
Tuberculosis

• To determine if people had any natural immunities
  to tuberculosis, and to develop a vaccine against
  the disease, Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer injected live
  tubercle bacilli (bacteria that are a major cause
  of TB) into the lungs of inmates at the
  Neuengamme concentration camp. About 200 adult
  subjects died, and Heissmeyer had 20 children
  from Auschwitz hung in an effort to hide evidence
  of the experiments from approaching Allied forces.

10
Phosgene

• In an attempt to find an antidote to phosgene, a
  toxic gas used as a weapon during World War I,
  Nazi doctors exposed 52 concentration-camp
  prisoners to the gas at Fort Ney near Strasbourg,
  France. Phosgene gas causes extreme irritation to
  the lungs. Many of the prisoners, who according
  to German records were already weak and
  malnourished, suffered pulmonary edema after
  exposure, and four of them died from the
  experiments.

11
Bone, Muscle, and Joint Transplantation

• To learn if a limb or joint from one person could
  be successfully attached to another who had lost
  that limb or joint, experimenters at Ravensbruck
  amputated legs and shoulders from inmates in
  useless attempts to transplant them onto other
  victims. They also removed sections of bones,
  muscles, and nerves from prisoners to study
  regeneration of these body parts. Victims
  suffered excruciating pain, mutilation, and
  permanent disability as a result.

12
Seawater

• Dr. Hans Eppinger and others at Dachau conducted
  experiments on how to make seawater drinkable.
  The doctors forced roughly 90 Gypsies to drink
  only seawater while also depriving them of food.
  The Gypsies became so dehydrated that they
  reportedly licked floors after they had been
  mopped just to get a drop of fresh water. The
  experiments caused enormous pain and suffering
  and resulted in serious bodily injury.

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13

• Few today would disagree about denouncing the
  Nazi experimenters as barbaric and their
  experiments as little more than sadistic torture
  executed under the guise of science.
• As such, many feel that findings from those
  studies should never be published or used.
  However, some of the research resulted in data
  that potentially could save lives today.
• Nazi hypothermia studies, for instance, have been
  cited in the medical literature for decades, and
  recently several scientists have sought to use
  the data in their own work.

14

• You will be asked the following question eight
  times "Based on what you now know, do you think
  doctors and scientists should be able to use data
  from Nazi death-camp experiments?"
• Each time, you must answer Yes or No to that
  question, and each time you will get a different
  counterargument meant to challenge your decision.
  
• Before answering the question for the eighth and
  final time, you may elect to read all 14
  counterargumentsseven for and seven against
  using the data.

15

• "Based on what you now know, do you think doctors
  and scientists should be able to use data from
  Nazi death-camp experiments?"
• YES NO

16

• What if you knew that the medical competence
  of the Nazi doctors has been questioned?The
  Hippocratic Oath, penned by the father of
  medicine and held by medical professionals as a
  sacred tenet to this day, states in part "I will
  use treatment to help the sick according to my
  ability and judgment, but never with a view to
  injury and wrongdoing...." The Nazi experimenters
  not only violated the oath in the foulest way,
  causing them to relinquish forever all rights to
  be considered doctors, but their expertise has
  been called into question, even by their own
  countrymen in their own day.
• YES NO Counterarguments

17
Counter 1A

• "Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve
  life. And out of respect for human life, I would
  remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased
  body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the
  body of mankind."
•  
• Dr. Fritz Klein, Nazi physician, responding to a
  concentration-camp inmate who asked, while
  pointing to smoking chimneys in the distance,
  "How can you reconcile that with your
  Hippocratic oath as a doctor?"

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18
Counter 1B

• "I wouldn't trust the man who produced the data
  from the Nazi experiments how can you trust a
  man who would do that?"
• Seymour Siegel, Executive Director of the U.S.
  Holocaust Memorial Council
• "Their actions were clear, direct violations of
  both the Hippocratic Oath as well as the public's
  belief that doctors always look after their
  patients' well-being."  
• Lauren Howell, in "Nazi Medical Experiments
  Murder or Research?"
• NEXT SLIDE

19
Counter 1C
CHOICE

• "One characteristic feature of Heissmeyer's
  experiment is his extraordinary lack of concern,
  add this to his gross and total ignorance in the
  field of immunology, in particular bacteriology.
  He did not then, nor does he now, possess the
  necessary expertise demanded in a specialist on
  TB diseases ... He does not own any modern
  bacteriology textbook. He is also not familiar
  with the various work methods of bacteriology ...
  According to his own admission, Heissmeyer was
  not concerned about curing the prisoners who were
  put at his disposal. Nor did he believe that his
  experiments would produce therapeutic results,
  and he actually counted on there being
  detrimental, indeed fatal, outcomes to the
  prisoners."
• Dr. Otto Prokop, Germany's forensic authority,
  on the competence of Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer.
  Heissmeyer conducted tuberculosis experiments on
  20 Jewish children from Auschwitz whom he later
  had hung so they could not bear witness.
  

20
What if you knew that many in the medical and
scientific communities consider the Nazi
experiments bad science?

• Those who judge the Nazi experiments poor science
  cite several reasons. First, drawn as they were
  from the death camps, experimentees were usually
  malnourished, emaciated, and severely weakened,
  and thus their physiological responses to the
  experiments would likely be different from those
  of normal, healthy people. Second, Nazi doctors
  had political aspirations and sought results that
  supported Nazi racial theories. Third, the data
  were never replicated and, in an ethical world,
  can never be replicated. Finally, soaked with the
  blood of their victims, the experiments were
  morally tainted, which renders them
  scientifically invalid. For these reasons, many
  dismiss the experiments as pseudoscience.

To test how to treat phosphorus burns, a mixture
of phosphorus and rubber to inmates' skin,
ignited it, and let it burn for 20 seconds
YES NO
Counterargument
21
Counter 2A

• "The experiments were a ghostly failure as well
  as a hideous crime ... They revealed nothing
  which civilized medicine could use."
•  
• Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief counsel
  for the prosecution at Nuremberg "Doctors Trial,"
  1946-47
• "Injecting a half-starved young girl with phenol
  to see how quickly she will die or trying out
  various forms of phosgene gas on camp inmates in
  the hope of finding cheap, clean, and efficient
  modes of killing so the state can effectively
  prosecute genocide is not the sort of activity
  associated with the term research."
•  
• Dr. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist now at the
  University of Pennsylvania
•  

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22
Counter 2B

• "I don't see how any credence can be given to the
  work of unethical investigators. Given the source
  of the information and the way in which it was
  obtained, how can anyone believe it? How can
  anyone want to believe it?"
•  
• Dr. Arnold S. Relman, editor of the New England
  Journal of Medicine, on the Nazi hypothermia work
  

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23
Counter 2C
CHOICE

• "The Dachau hypothermia experiments were
  conducted without an orderly experimental
  protocol and with inadequate methods and an
  erratic execution. ... There is also evidence of
  data falsification and suggestions of
  fabrication. Many conclusions are not supported
  by the facts presented. The flawed science is
  compounded by evidence that the director of the
  project showed a consistent pattern of dishonesty
  and deception in his professional as well as his
  personal life, thereby stripping the study of the
  last vestige of credibility. On analysis, the
  Dachau hypothermia study has all the ingredients
  of a scientific fraud, and rejection of the data
  on purely scientific grounds is inevitable."
•  
• Dr. Robert L. Berger, New England Deaconness
  Hospital and Harvard Medical School
•  

24
What if using the Nazi data could set a
dangerous precedent, sanctioning unethical human
experiments and possibly encouraging similarly
deplorable acts?

• A brief review of history indicates that the evil
  perpetrated by the Nazi doctors is one of degree,
  not of type. White South African physicians
  falsified medical reports of blacks tortured or
  killed in prison. From the mid-1950s to the early
  1970s, New York University researchers infected
  mentally retarded children with hepatitis in
  order to track the course of the disease and
  search for a cure. In 1963, doctors at the Jewish
  Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York,
  injected 'live' cancer cells into 22 chronically
  ill and debilitated patients they did not inform
  the patients that they were participating in an
  experiment completely unrelated to treatment of
  the disease for which they were hospitalized.
  These cases may not be as heinous as the Nazi
  experiments, but if researchers cite and use
  results from the latter, might that not give
  tacit encouragement to further unethical studies
  using human beings?

Counterarguments
YES NO
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Counterargument 3A

• "Using information from the death camps might
  be seen as sanctioning the use of results from
  current unethical research and thus encourage
  more of it."
• Marcia Angell, M.D. 9
• "Doctors in general, it would seem, can all too
  readily take part in the efforts of fanatical,
  demagogic, or surreptitious groups to control
  matters of thought and feeling, and of living and
  dying."
• Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors
  Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,
  after listing numerous instances of cases in
  which doctors throughout the world have conducted
  evil acts in the name of nationalism or racism
  10

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26
Counter 3B
CHOICE

• "To declare the use of the Nazi data ethical, as
  some of the American scientists and doctors
  advocate, would open a Pandora's box and could
  become an excuse for any of the Ayatollahs,
  Kadafis, Stroessners, and Mengeles of the world
  to create similar circumstances whereby anyone
  could be used as their guinea pig."
• Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's
  twins experiments at Auschwitz 11
• "While using such data could save lives in some
  situations ... in a much larger context it could
  lead to a way of thinking that would condone
  taking some lives in order to save others."  
• A reporter paraphrasing comments made by Dr.
  Judith Bellin, an Environmental Protection Agency
  toxicologist, about using data from Nazi phosgene
  experiments 12 

27
What if you knew that many feel that using the
data would make us the Nazi experimenters' moral
accessories?

• Many hold that making use of the data wrenched so
  brutally from helpless victims would not only
  validate the Nazi doctors' unthinkable acts, but
  also make us the victims' "retrospective
  torturers" and them our "retrospective guinea
  pigs" . Indeed, Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief
  Rabbi of the British Commonwealth of Nations and
  an expert in Jewish medical ethics, felt use
  would only serve to further dishonor the victims
  while the late Harvard Medical School professor
  Dr. Henry Beecher believed publishing unethically
  obtained medical data would cause a "far-reaching
  moral loss to medicine."

Rudolf Brandt, an SS officer and aide to Himmler,
was found guilty of a host of war crimes,
including conducting medical experimentation and
killing tuberculosis-infected people. Sentenced
to death, he was hanged on June 2, 1948
Counterarguments
YES NO
28
Counter 4A

• "The idea behind the negative reaction now is
  that the Nazis were criminals we are decent.
  That's not true. What we've done is not as evil,
  but it's in the ballpark."
• Dr. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist now at the
  University of Pennsylvania, commenting about
  uproar surrounding physiologist Robert Pozos'
  proposed use of Nazi data on hypothermia
• "The conduct of Nazi physician-scientists was
  barbarous, revolting, monstrous, devoid of any
  decency. Their research defiled human beings,
  medicine, science, and humanity. They dragged
  through bloody mud an honorable profession to
  which contemporary physician-scientists who now
  wish to make use of these results belong."
• Jay Katz, M.D., Yale University School of Law

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29
Counter 4 B
CHOICE

• "Today some doctors want to use the only thing
  left by these victims. They are like vultures
  waiting for the corpses to cool so they could
  devour every consummable part. To use the Nazi
  data is obscene and sick. One can always
  rationalize that it would save human lives the
  question should be asked, at what cost?"
•  
• Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's
  twins experiments at Auschwitz
• "We must not add our numbers to the multitudes
  of onlookers who slept peacefully through the
  nights of anguished cries while dreaming their
  sweet dreams of a better tomorrow."
•  
• Dr. Willard Gaylin, psychiatrist and former
  president of The Hastings Center, a biomedical
  ethics thinktank

30
What if you knew that many survivors of the Nazi
experiments feel strongly that the data should
never be used?

• Among the small minority of those experimented
  upon who survived to bring shocking details of
  the atrocities to the outside world are a vocal
  group who would consign the data to oblivion.
  Many make the same arguments that modern doctors
  and scientists opposed to the data's use make,
  namely, that using the information would
  legitimize the Nazi experimenters and their
  damnable undertakings, make us moral accomplices,
  further demean the victims, etc. Responses from
  survivors asked whether the data should be used
  ranged from the calm and reasoned to the
  incredulous "No! No! No! I (we) suffered, and it
  is no 'medical data' or 'information'
  whatsoever!!!"

YES NO
Counterarguments
31
Counter 5A

• "As much as I am for scientific research for the
  betterment of humanity, I do feel that the
  scientific data collected from experiments done
  on inmates of Nazi concentration camps should not
  be used. If I would agree, I feel I would give
  a stamp of approval to the ways and means these
  experiments have been conducted and
  quasi-legalize them."  
• Anonymous survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins
  experiments at Auschwitz

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32
Counter 5B

• "The scientist who reuses these data aligns
  himself with the values and methods of the Nazi
  scientists/doctors by extending their work into
  contemporary research, thereby giving it
  credibility and sanction. He too is saying first
  and foremost, 'for the sake of science' and for
  the sake of 'progress,' ignoring the case for
  humanity."
• Sara Vigorito, survivor of Mengele's twins
  experiments at Auschwitz. Just three years old
  when she arrived, Vigorito spent a year in a
  wooden cage a yard and a half wide with her twin
  sister, who died from repeated injections to her
  spinal column

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Counter 5 C

• "In the case of the Mengele Twins, copies of the
  data should be given to those twins who are still
  alive. The data of the victims who are dead
  should be shredded and placed in a transparent
  monument, as evidence that they exist but cannot
  be used. It should be a lesson to the world that
  human dignity and human life are more important
  than any advance in science and medicine."
• Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's
  twins experiments at Auschwitz

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Counter 5 D
CHOICE

• "I consider it inexcusable to dignify those
  murderers with the word 'scientist' or dignify
  what they did with the word 'research' ... The
  data should be thrown to the winds and
  forgotten."
•  
• Gisela Konopka, concentration-camp survivor

35
What if you knew just how much victims of the
experiments suffered?

• "One cannot fully confront the dilemma of using
  the results of Nazi experiments," the attorney
  and ethicist Baruch Cohen has written, "without
  sensitizing one's self to the images of the
  frozen, the injected, the inseminated, and the
  sterilized." 26 One could add without
  sensitizing oneself to eyewitness testimony.
  Obviously, the hundreds who died at the hands of
  Nazi death-camp doctors cannot tell their story
  of unfathomable fear, unbearable pain, and
  senseless death. One must rely on those who
  survived and those who witnessed the execrable
  atrocities that occurred in the concentration
  camps. Here is some of that testimony

prisoner during low-pressure experimentation at
Dachau, 1942.
YES NO
Counterarguments
36
Counter 6A

• "The third experiment ... took such an
  extraordinary course that I called an SS
  physician of the camp as witness, since I had
  worked on these experiments all by myself. It was
  a continuous experiment without oxygen at a
  simulated height of 12 kilometers 39,283 feet
  conducted on a 37-year-old Jew in good general
  condition. Breathing continued up to 30 minutes.
  After four minutes the experimental subject began
  to perspire and wiggle his head, after five
  minutes cramps occurred, between six and ten
  minutes breathing increased in speed and the
  experimental subject became unconscious from 11
  to 30 minutes breathing slowed down to three
  breaths per minute, finally stopping altogether."
  
• From a report by Dr. Sigmund Rascher to Heinrich
  Himmler dated April 5, 1942 concerning his
  high-altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau
  concentration camp

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37
Counter 6 B
CHOICE

• "It was the worst experiment ever made. Two
  Russian officers were brought from the prison
  barracks. Rascher had them stripped and they had
  to go into the vat naked. Hour after hour went
  by, and whereas usually unconsciousness from the
  cold set in after 60 minutes at the latest, the
  two men in this case still responded fully after
  two and a half hours. All appeals to Rascher to
  put them to sleep by injection were fruitless.
  After the third hour one of the Russians said to
  the other, 'Comrade, please tell the officer to
  shoot us.' The other replied that he expected no
  mercy from this Fascist dog. The two shook hands
  with a 'Farewell, Comrade' ... These words were
  translated to Rascher by a young Pole, though in
  a somewhat different form. Rascher went to his
  office. The young Pole at once tried to
  chloroform the two victims, but Rascher came back
  at once, threatening us with his gun ... The test
  lasted at least five hours before death
  supervened."
• Testimony given at the "Doctors Trial" at
  Nuremberg by Walter Neff, an Auschwitz prisoner
  who served as Dr. Sigmund Rascher's medical
  orderly during hypothermia experiments

38
Click HERE for the final question
39
What if the Nazi experiments had been conducted
on your mother, your brother, your child?

• "I offer this challenge to the hypothermia
  researchers. As you page through the research,
  have next to it actual photos of Jews being
  tortured in the name of research and see how long
  you are able to analyze data. Better yet, think
  of your mother or father floating in that tank
  and see if your beliefs about this subject hold
  up."

Nazi doctors immerse a prisoner in ice water
during hypothermia experiments at Dachau.
Make your decision
40
Click On Your Final Decision

• YES
• NO

41
What if you knew that not publishing and/or using
the data could strengthen the arguments of those
who say the Holocaust never happened?

• So-called Holocaust deniers maintain that the
  Holocaust itself never took place. Many who find
  such arguments absurd and detestable feel that
  failing to cite or use the Nazi data might only
  fan the flames of Holocaust denial. As such, most
  scholars, whether or not they advocate using the
  Nazi data, hold that the fact that the
  experiments happened should never be forgotten,
  lest such atrocities recur. Thus, Dr. Jay Katz of
  Yale Law School, who opposes use, would publish
  the data in full detail, then condemn them to
  oblivion 31, while Ronald Banner of the Jewish
  Ethical Medical Study Group in Philadelphia, who
  does not oppose citation of the data,
  nevertheless feels "chagrined that someone would
  refer to those experiments without mentioning
  something about the way the information was
  gained. It shows a lack of conscience. There are
  times that something, morally, stinks so bad that
  you have to hold your nose even while you refer
  to it."

YES NO
Counterarguments
42
Counter 1A

• It sends a chill down every normal human beings
  spine to think of the horrible things the Nazis
  did there, but Im separating the results and the
  circumstances. Actually, if the U.S. doctor
  Pozos dedicated his study to the memory of
  those victims of the Nazis, it would serve as a
  nice way of reminding people about the horrible
  experiments.
• Ephraim Zuroff, Israeli representative to the
  Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles

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43
Counter 1 B

• I submit that we must put the Holocaust and the
  Nazi experiments directly under the floodlights
  and on center stage even if some of us and our
  past and present are partly illuminated by the
  glare. Instead of banning the Nazi data or
  assigning it to some archivist or custodial
  committee, I maintain that it be exhumed,
  printed, and disseminated to every medical school
  in the world along with the details of
  methodology and the names of the doctors who did
  it, whether or not they were indicted, acquitted,
  or hanged. ... Let the students and the residents
  and the young doctors know that this was not
  ancient history or an episode from a horror movie
  where the actors get up after filming and prepare
  for another role. It was real. It happened
  yesterday. ... They tried to burn the bodies and
  to suppress the data. We must not finish the job
  for them.
• Dr. Velvl W. Greene, professor of medical ethics
  at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel
  NEXT SLIDE

44
Counter 1 C
CHOICE

• The best argument Ive heard for preserving
  the Nazi data is to keep evidence that those
  experiments were carried out. As long as the data
  are available, evidence that at least some people
  did some bad things in Nazi Germany cannot be
  denied.
•  
• Howard M. Spiro, M.D., Department of Internal
  Medicine, Yale University

45
What if you knew that such data could not be
obtained today?

• Hypothermia expert Dr. Robert Pozos had immersed
  hundreds of volunteers into ice water in the
  years after he founded the University of
  Minnesota's Hypothermia Laboratory in 1977. (He
  is no longer affiliated with the university.) But
  he never let a participant's temperature drop
  more than 3.6F (i.e., below 95F). Unburdened by
  even the slightest sense of humanity, the Nazi
  hypothermia experimenters, , on the other hand,
  let their victims' interior body temperatures
  drop to 79.7F before attempting to revive them.
  Most died an excruciatingly painful death as a
  result. However, some did revive, and the Nazis
  found that rapid rewarming in hot water proved
  the most effective way to revive them. In an
  ethical world, such data would not exist, but
  they do exist and could benefit humanity. Should
  they simply be lost to science?

At the Nuremberg "Doctors Trial," Dr. Alexander
points at scars on the leg of Polish survivor who
endured sulfanilamide experiments at Ravensbruck
concentration camp.
Counterarguments
YES NO
46
Counter 2 A

• "Dr. Rascher, although he wallowed in blood ...
  and in obscenity ... nevertheless appears to have
  settled the question of what to do for people in
  shock from exposure to cold ... The final report
  satisfies all the criteria of objective and
  accurate observation and interpretation ... The
  method of rapid and intensive rewarming in hot
  water ... should be immediately adopted as the
  treatment of choice by the Air-Sea Rescue
  Services of the United States Armed Forces."  
• Maj. Leo Alexander, U.S. Army doctor who served
  as aide to the chief counsel of the Nuremberg
  war-crimes trial and authored an oft-cited 1945
  report on the Dachau hypothermia experiments.
  While Alexander later concluded the results were
  undependable, other medical experts, most
  recently hypothermia researchers Robert Pozos and
  John Hayward, have claimed that the data are
  useful NEXT SLIDE

47
Counter 2 B

• "The goal of science is to produce new knowledge.
  If, during unethically conducted experiments, one
  valid scientific fact is produced, should that
  information be used as it has been, referenced in
  the literature as it has been, or just
  discarded?"  
• Jay Katz (Yale University School of Law) and
  Robert S. Pozos (hypothermia expert)
• "I don't want to have to use this data, but
  there is no other and will be no other in an
  ethical world."
• Dr. John S. Hayward, hypothermia expert at
  University of Victoria University, Vancouver,
  B.C., Canada, on why he used Nazi hypothermia
  data in his research

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48
Counter 2 C
CHOICE

• "To justify the use of Nazi data in a research
  article, I would expect scientists to use the
  findings only in circumstances where the
  scientific validity is clear and where there is
  no alternative source of information."
• Kristine Moe, journalist

49
If you feel that the Nazi results are tainted
because of the way they were obtained, what if
you knew that many deem information morally
neutral?

• Many scientists might argue that while the Nazi
  experiments were nothing short of bestial, their
  results can only be judged scientifically, not
  morally data are neither good nor bad, they are
  just data. Even if scientists, journal editors,
  and others were to judge results on moral
  grounds, Dr. Eleanor Singer, editor of Public
  Opinion Quarterly, considers it "nonsense to talk
  about 'enforcing ethical standards' as though
  these were clear and agreed-upon." Until the
  scientific community reaches a consensus on the
  degree to which ethical concerns should govern
  the spread of scientific knowledge, Singer
  maintains, "I would argue that open
  dissemination, not censorship, affords the best
  chance for developing agreed-upon principles of
  what constitutes ethical research procedures, and
  of how potential conflicts among ethical
  principles, and between such principles and
  scientific goals, are to be resolved."

YES NO
Counterarguments
50
Counter 3 A

• "The most powerful argument in defense of the use
  of the data gathered by unethical methods is that
  the information gathered is independent of the
  ethics of the methods and that the two are not
  linked together. In essence, data are neither
  evil nor good."
• Dr. Robert Pozos, hypothermia expert

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51
Counter 3 B

• "Perhaps the most intriguing question on which
  the issue of proper use turns is whether or not
  scientific data can acquire a moral taint. Common
  sense seems to indicate that a parcel of
  information about the physical world is morally
  neutral."
• Brian Folker and Arthur W. Hafner

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52
Counter 3 C
CHOICE

• "We are talking of the use of the data, not
  participation in these heinous studies, not
  replication of atrocities. The wrongs perpetrated
  were monstrous those wrongs are over and done.
  How could the provenance of the data serve to
  prohibit their use?"
• The late Dr. Benjamin Freedman, formerly a
  bioethicist at McGill University in Montreal

53
What if you knew that the data might help save
lives today?

• Hypothermia expert Robert Pozos believes Nazi
  data on rapid rewarming could save lives, while
  Dr. John Hayward, also a specialist in
  hypothermia, has used Nazi cooling curves to
  determine how long cold-water survival suits
  would safeguard people at near-fatal
  temperatures. As journalist Kristine Moe has
  pointed out, scientists and physicians have
  gained valuable insights from other horrific
  events in history. Jewish doctors locked inside
  the Warsaw Ghetto took copious clinical notes on
  how their compatriots, many of them children,
  perished from starvation smuggled out of the
  ghetto, those notes were later published as a
  landmark study on hunger disease. Survivors of
  the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
  offered a valuable, albeit tragic, opportunity
  for specialists to learn more about radiation
  sickness. With human lives at stake, should we
  consider the Nazi data any differently?

Detailed notes kept by Jewish doctors on children
and adults who starved to death in the Warsaw
ghetto were later published as a seminal study on
hunger disease.
Counterarguments
YES NO
54
Counter 4 A

• "The argument that the information from the
  Dachau hypothermia experiments could be used to
  save human lives is a powerful one...."
• Dr. Robert Pozos, hypothermia expert
• "I'm trying to make something constructive out
  of it. I use it with my guard up, but it's
  useful."
• Dr. John S. Hayward, hypothermia expert at
  University of Victoria University, Vancouver,
  B.C., Canada, on why he used Nazi hypothermia
  data in his research

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55
Counter 4 B
CHOICE

• "We won't argue that the experiments were well
  reported or well designed, but compared to what
  we had, they offered a measure of improvement.
  They obviously had a lot of flaws. But we felt
  compelled to use it because it provided
  dose-response data."
• John Vandenberg, EPA project manager in charge
  of regulatory review of phosgene gas, on why he
  condoned citing data from the Nazi phosgene
  experiments

56
If the data have a chance to benefit people
today, are we not morally obligated to use them?

• The United States produces about one billion
  pounds of phosgene gas a year for use in
  manufacturing plastics and pesticides. Yet
  phosgene causes lung irritation and fluid
  build-up and can making breathing difficult if
  not impossible. To assess the risks to factory
  workers and those living nearby, the
  Environmental Protection Agency thought of using
  Nazi data on phosgene-gas experiments, but
  decided it was immoral. As one writer commented,
  "Is it fair to those people currently being
  exposed to the chemical to pretend that
  applicable data do not exist? Can the ethical
  questions be so compelling that we ignore
  information that might conceivably reduce the
  amount of human suffering and misery currently
  being experienced?"

YES NO
Counterarguments
57
Counter 5 A

• "We cannot imply any approval of the methods.
  Nor, however, should we let the inhumanity of the
  experiments blind us to the possibility that some
  good may be salvaged from the ashes."
• Kristine Moe, journalist
• "Perhaps justice would ultimately be served if we
  were to allow life to emerge from the Nazi
  murders."  
• Baruch Cohen, attorney and ethicist

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58
Counter 5 B
CHOICE

• "As a child of survivors of the Holocaust, I have
  strong empathy for those opposed to the data's
  use. Nevertheless, as a physician who deals with
  children and has seen them comatose, brain
  damaged, and dead from hypothermia, my sense is
  that to save one child through the use of this
  information is worthwhile."
• Anonymous medical doctor

59
What if you knew that many survivors of the
medical experiments feel that the data should be
used?

• The first three opinions given below come from
  survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele's twins
  experiments at Auschwitz. Dr. Nancy L. Segal, a
  psychologist, quoted the survivors in her article
  "Twin Research at Auschwitz-Birkenau
  Implications for the Use of Nazi Data Today."

YES NO
Counterarguments
60
Counter 6 A
CHOICE

• "If these experiments will be of any help to
  humanity, then I am in favor of them being used
  as needed.""I think that the data collected in
  experiments conducted on us should by all means
  be used, since there were a variety of methods
  used, and I am certain that the data can be very
  beneficial to today's doctor.""It appears that,
  at least in some cases, there was an attempt to
  induce illness by injecting bacteria and then an
  attempt to cure these illnesses, that is to say,
  we served as laboratory animals in the hands of
  the criminal, Mengele, and this type of research
  should of course be made available to the
  world.""I wore a number in Dachau. I have two
  Belgian friends who went through the procedures
  of Dr. Rascher ... I see no reason why the
  results obtained should not be used for further
  research."
• Unnamed concentration-camp survivor

61
Might not using the data lend a belated dignity
to the victims, so that their lives were not lost
for nothing?

• "Of course, nobody in their right mind condones
  the experiment. The question is, Given that this
  fiendish thing was done, what do you do with the
  information that exists. ... I suspect that the
  prisoners would have wanted to have the
  information used to help somebody."
• Todd Thorslund, vice president of ICF-Clement,
  an environmental consulting company that wrote a
  risk-assessment report for the Environmental
  Protection Agency that cited Nazi phosgene
  experiments  
• "The suffering is donelet someone benefit from
  all the pain."
• Lucien A. Ballin, member of a military
  intelligence assault force that helped unearth
  Nazi medical-experiments data in 1945

A Dachau prisoner during a high-altitude experiment.
Final Decision