MEDICINE:
Unethical
Research
from
Nazi
Germany
One can say that progress has its price, but in
some cases that price is far too high. Yet
another problem with some scientific advances is the environment they were
conducted in. It's easy to read
scientific facts in textbooks without knowing about the experimentation behind
the knowledge. The “dark side”
of science is what this site hopes to address in order to better educate
individuals on the history of science.
The last area that we will look into is medical science that has come about
unethically. The example that first
comes to mind deals with Nazi Germany's horrifying medical research.
Gaining knowledge was obviously not the main goal of Nazi Germany, but it
was still acquired through the inhumane treatment of the Jewish people.
Some of the best anatomy books of the time came out of Germany from what
surely was a most horrific researching technique.
As National Socialism infiltrated Germany it also encompassed numerous important
scientific institutes. The
biomedical field was taken over, which was of great importance because of the
research done in this area. As the
number of German physicians within the Nazi party grew so did unethical medical
research. Human specimens were
obtained from the death camps and used in research, but that was not the most
shocking practice. Research was
also carried out on the living. These
individuals would always be put to death in order to further study effects on
the body after the preliminary experimentation was complete.
Methods in sterilization, execution by injection, and drug effectiveness
tests were among a few of the areas that were explored by these outrageous
practices. In order to get a better
understanding here are a few examples from http://remember.org/imagine/doctors.html.
"Nazi
physicians subjected concentration-camp
inmates to high-altitude experiments, confining
them in low-pressure chambers until their lungs
exploded" (Silverstein, 1996).
"To discover the most effective way of
rewarding German pilots who had been
downed in the North Sea, they immersed
prisoners in tanks of freezing water for hours,
lowering their body temperatures to 26
degrees" (Silverstein, 1996).
"To
gain specimens for their Jewish skeleton
collection, the Nazi physicians murdered and
stripped the flesh from 100 Jewish prisoners"
(Silverstein, 1996).
"To
compare the effectiveness of vaccines,
they injected inmates with malaria,
typhus, smallpox, cholera, and spotted fever"
(Silverstein, 1996).
"The
physicians broke their subjects' bones
and then infected the wounds, fed them sea
water until they had seizures and suffered
cardiac arrest, operated on them with out
anesthesia, . . ." (Silverstein, 1996).
"Some
bodies were dissected, and their brains
sent to research institutes, where scientists
tried to determine the physical causes of
mental illness" (Fishkoff, 1996).
(For
more information check out the website:
http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/assignments/experiment.html)
This
horrible tragedy did not bring about any information that we could not have
learned at a sufficient level by performing ethical research.
One important aspect did come out of this disaster and that would be the
Nuremberg Code. This code works to
protect subjects when it comes to medical research.
A copy of it may be found in the November 27, 1996, Journal of the
American Medical Association (pp. 1691) or at the following website: http://www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/Nuremberg_Code.htm.
As you can see knowledge was in fact gained, but only at an unreasonable cost.
Science has many benefits, but is not the "be all, end all" of
life. It is thus for the above
reasons that ethics should take precedents over progress.