From Nazi medicine to GM babies, unethical research has a deeply problematic history. But what should we do when the results of these studies could offer useful scientific insight?
Text: Tom Ireland
Tom Ireland is editor of The Biologist at the Royal Society of Biology. Follow him on Twitter at @Tom_J_Ireland
More than 30 years ago, in 1988, hypothermia expert Robert Pozos decided to unearth a document that society had tried to forget for almost 40 years. The 68-page report, compiled by an American army officer after WWII, contained details of the horrific experiments that Nazi doctors had conducted on many people in concentration camps.
These procedures, and the conduct of the Nazi doctors stationed at camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz, make for difficult reading. More akin to sadistic torture than research, the ‘experiments’ involved Jews being frozen to death, dissected alive, poisoned, wounded without anaesthetic, or sterilised – all supposedly in the name of advancing Nazi medicine.
After the details of Nazi war crimes were revealed at the Nuremberg Trials in the late 1940s, the documents relating to these atrocities were placed in the US Library of Congress. It was imagined that few would ever want to take such material off the shelves.
Yet Pozos, the director of a hypothermia research lab at the University of Minneapolis, believed the results of some of these evil studies could be used for good. He thought that the Nazi experiments on the effects of cold – conducted in the hope that it might help downed German fighter pilots survive longer in freezing waters – could be useful in his work developing treatments for severe hypothermia.
[blur]The Nazis had meticulously recorded the effects of cold up to the point of death, and trialled various methods of warming people up from the brink. It was the sort of data Pozos could never obtain with volunteers or patients in a trauma ward. It could help save lives. To some, the plan to use Nazi ‘research’ was an outrage. How could one treat accounts of human torture as if it were scientific data? Yet, others – including some relatives of the victims – felt that, if it meant some good could come from such terrible suffering, then it should be done. The dilemma kick-started an ethical debate that still divides opinion today: what should we do with the results of tainted or unethical research? [/blur]
