Yeah, when I read that SS scientists who visited wrote back to command protesting the experiments they'd seen it really drove home how fucked up it must have been for white supremacists to think the non-white people torturing other non-white people were taking it too far.
Mostly they thought they were being inefficient. The medical knowledge gained from the Nazis were substantial and boosted medical research over 100 years from what it would have taken but the Japanese thought it could have been so much more because of just how many subjects they had to work on at a time compared to how few were being actually experimented on or just straight up executed. In a numbers kinda fucked up way they weren't wrong but damn thats scary.
As the answer in the link states, the premises of many of the experiments were flawed due to being based in Nazi race science and the experimental design and analysis of the results were also flawed
This. There's this permeating myth that ethics shackle advancement, but in reality most unethical research is garbage information, has falsifications, gives already known info, or has shit methodology.
Almost as if a lack of ethics normally makes trive self interested researchers who love to sbuse the lack of oversight to advance their careers.
Edit: The amount of yapping to justify such fucked up things in the responses really tell a lot about why the world is so fucked right now. If you are about to tell me some ultra specific thing that somehow justify these horrors, or go into semantics: don't.
Go touch grass.
There's this permeating myth that ethics shackle advancement
Rapture.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor.
Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality.
Where the great would not be constrained by the small!
And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
IRL people keep trying to make 'rapture' variants and finding out exactly why that ideology doesn't work, especially not when you put a bunch of them in one place.
It's crazy seeing people use Rapture as an ideal while completely missing the point. I know they can't understand subtext, but it isn't really subtext, it's just text.
Mm. The kind of people who are willing to violate medical ethics are rarely the kind of people willing to conduct an actually useful experiment. The cruelty is the point. Anything useful is a side effect at best.
Firstly, it's the first time I've ever heard of the book and I'm in the field. Maybe it's popular in the UK, but not universal.
Secondly, and here's kind of the point, there's nothing that book contains that couldn't have been achieved with proper ethical methodology.
Proper anatomical work doesn't require you to be an asshole to achieve. The nazis just provided bodies, but it's not as if you could only perform dissections in the 30's if you got hold of political prisoners.
Third - the point is that not all unethical research resulted in useless garbage. It just made it cheaper to produce something that was better than anything else available for decades.
If it was simply garbage, there would be no dilemma.
Fourth - the point of the article is that people want to produce an ethical replacement, and that takes time and money. But it's worth doing.
Yes, i have. And it's not ignorance. Different books are employed in different parts of the world, and as time goes old books no longer in publication will naturally fade.
Like, you actually need to study the age groups of those still using the book, as it's natural that people who studied while it was still going around will use it as their reference material, whereas people trained after the 2020's will be less likely to use a book well over 30 years since it's last update.
It's not ignorance, it's like if you came around and asked me wheter I still use a (albeit good) abandoware software from the XP era and i told you i have zero clue as i use something that's still has active development.
About your last point, is it? Really? The thing sbout much of those unethical things is that when they actually land something useful, many times it's redundant, or it's very case specific, or it's better than alternatives but still not exactly groundbreaking irreplaceable stuff.
Like, by 48' Netter was already publishing his illustrations. It's just that he didn't really publish his atlas until 89'.
Besides, in this case it was less that the human rights violations helped, and much more that the guy was extremely committed and disciplined in his work. He could've perfectly published his book around the same time frame while still working within ethical boundries.
Rather an a myth I think it's something that was necessary for medical knowledge before the world was connected and knowledge freely and easily shared everywhere. I mean in the 19th century American doctors were still putting nails through peoples skulls, I reckon the collective species had that one ruled out as sound medical practice before pants were invented.
No. It was never needed. I'm sorry, but it's morronic to even suggest it.
The field of bioethics had to quickly develop in response to researchers being massive monsters who'd put people through awful unnecessary pain while not really providing much advancements.
It doesn't necessarily need to be intentional. How many people got ultra cancer in the 50s from extremely poor use of X-rays on those goofy machines and radiation therapy? A lot of people had to die before that was understood properly, or to convince the governments of the world to be less stupid with radiation lmao.
Some of it is also leftover cultural 'treatments' that were extremely barbaric and ineffective, but nobody knew any better.
Brain surgery is also straight up trial and error before our extremely advanced equipment came around. Lobotomies are a purely malicious treatment that massively helped our understanding of the human brain and what not to rip out with a spoon for actually useful surgeries.
Barry Marshall violated ethics by infecting himself with H. Pylori to get an ulcer, then curing it with antibiotics. He won the Nobel Prize for this in 2005.
Wow, yeah, a guy putting himself through danger, in a single case that wasn't really what earned him the Nobel and just a very preliminary case, totally and through fully convinced me that institutional human rights violations are necessary for human progress.
I disagree. There are fields of research that could be advanced massively if ethics were pushed to the side. The issue is that unethical research is done in the shadows without the ability to actually conduct large sweeping studies, so it relies on more unreliable methods of investigation and study.
Take human cloning for instance, we could learn so much more if we just got to it. It's not that human mortality somehow aligned with the areas of research that can be researched.
For all you know, if we never had an ick about it, we could be in a world where we grow donor bodies for organs and limbs instead of recycling.
Or take designer babies as an example. Still a moral grey zone, and if accepted it could be relatively cheap due to scale to ensure that any parents that want it, could eliminate chances of disease in their newborns. Wipe out so many disorders in a few generations.
Firstly, you are confusing Morals and Ethics. The former is based upon more cultural alignments, the later upon philosophical ones. Ethics are often what pushes morality aside as new evidence and new agreements come around.
Secondly, as I mentioned, it's not "all", but "most". Would there be some areas that push forward? Yeah. But a HUGE part of unethical research ends up wasting resources on top of causing non justified suffering, because a core of bioethics is actually checking wheter there is a y benefits to whatever you research.
Like, if you made a study over what happens if a baby has aids and rabies simultaneously and infect a thousand. Yeah, if you made the best methodology ever, you'd have the most authoritative evidence in the subject; but, why? What's it's actual use vs the cost?
As for cloning and designer babies, the problem is that as a society we haven't really been able to respond to crucial questions. Simple things such as who owns the IP over said genomes, or something as baseline as what actually happens to unused fertilized ovules, with there already being cases of transfer of them between companies. Or the abuse of gestacional surrogates, as it happens with, for example, Musk and his fucked up compound.
Those areas are massive cand of worms that would completely spiral out of control if we just five head first without a good understanding of the social consequences of it, snd may completely outweight any benefits in the long term as humanity would get divided in the haves and have nots, insane billionaire eugenics, and corporate meddling into ownership of genomes.
Sometimes taking a step back and thinking what lies ahead and preparing is better than just blindly diving.
Correct. They were just horrendous crimes against humanity. At least one project wasn't entirely though and the ethical discussions around the use of their results is interesting: The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments (The New England Journal of Medicine)
It’s just another version of “made the trains run on time.” Fascists want you to think that even if you think they are brutal, they still get shit done. It’s not true though, they are venal, feckless, officious oafs. They are generally shit at things because loyalty and being “of the nation” is more important than any level of competence.
100 years over where it would have been is an incredible overstatement. They documented a few things in limited areas that were somewhat useful, medically (like what it looks like to die of hypothermia or dehydration) but a lot of their experimentation was duplicative of other work or ideologically driven attempts to provide their unscientific race theories. Due to their ideology it's also difficult to trust some of the data. They absolutely did not advance medical science by anything close to 100 years.
((I typed a really fucked up experiment here, and realized I would 100% get banned for it, but I put so much effort into it that I have to put SOMETHING here anyways)) - Japan during WW2 probably.
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u/Platnun12 2d ago
When the SS think you are fucked in the head
You are 1000% fucked in the head