Ethical Debate
For using the data"The best argument I've 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., arguing for the preservation of the Nazi data "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, describing why he used Nazi hypothermia data in his research "The suffering is done—let 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, explaining why the data from the experiments should be used |
Against Using the Data"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, arguing that the experiments done by the Nazis were not scientific "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, talking about the Nazi hypothermia experiments "[U]sing 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., explaining the consequences of using the Nazi data |