The Nazi Medical Research Data: Use It or Lose It? (12)
In today’s podcast, we talk about one of the most egregious abuses of ethics in modern history: the horrible medical experiments carried out by Nazi physicians during WWII. Should we make use of the data that the Nazi doctors obtained, even though it was often gathered by taking the lives of Jewish prisoners in death camps? Or is it more respectful of the dignity of those who died in the Holocaust to let this information die with them?
My special guests in today’s podcast are some Cedarville University students in my ‘Principles of Bioethics’ class.They are: Katie Condit, Tara Self, Jessica Seman, Kate Temple, and John Wildman.
Sources:
- When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust, Arthur Caplan, Humana, 1992.
- The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Lifton, Perseus, 2000.
Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.
Special Music: “Melancholy,” by Mark Heimonen
Music Bumpers: “Winter I plead,” by Acoustic Rosh and “Lost Acoustic” by Flashover.
To listen, just click on the player below (click on the “Audio MP3″ button if the player doesn’t appear).
Player:
Nathan wrote,
Enjoyed the podcast. It’s good to hear students learning sound Christian ethics at college. Not much of that happening elsewhere.
Concerning your topic, I would fall on the side of using the data as morally acceptable.
My first pass, gut-level check is to imagine how I would feel if I or one of my children was one of the one’s experimented on. I can not imagine any grief about other’s studying or benefiting from the experimentation, as long as they understood that the way the data was collected was wicked and condemn those same methods.
My second pass is to consider the 2 foundations for ethics: 1) loving God and 2) loving your neighbor. Does this pursuit of medical knowlege derived from wicked acts, hurt God or others, or does the pursuit benefit both God and others. I see only the latter applying.
I think if we exclude on moral grounds, learning medical lessons from the Nazi experiments, then we also have to exclude on the same grounds, learning moral lessons, from the Nazi experiments, which is exactly what we are doing right now.
Link | December 18th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
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[...] CedarEthics Podcast #12 Cedarville University Center for Bioethics Posted by Dennis Sullivan Posted in General, News, Journal Articles, Clinical / Medical Permalink [...]
Link | December 19th, 2007 at 4:12 pm