I flunked the summer online class but found out I didn't need my fall class so I switched it out and am retaking the summer class, only in person,. A classroom, new prof, and it's a 3-4 month class rather than cramming all this info into one month.
Today we covered clinical trials and the importance of consent. And then the ultimate no-consent "clinical trial" came up: Holocaust.
The strict rules for clinical trials weren't written until after WWII, when all the horros of the campps came out. Nuremburg trials. Prof said that any neuroscientist student in the room actually owed a lot to the suffering of innocent Jews who were alive when their skulls were drilled open and their brains were poked at.
Then prof asked the question I knew was coming....is it ok to use nazi research?
Ofc if neuroscience is already using it the question is kinda moot, but anyway....
I'm kinda uncomfy with the idea. I mean I can see both sides here. Using that research...there's a scene in Angel season 5 after Amy dies but Gunn is still in hospital bed, and he doesn't want to use his legal knowledge, and Angel says "we paid a high price for what's in your head". And I do get that using the research might kinda make those innocent Jewish deaths a little less in vain.
But I'm really afraid of legitimizing what those asshole nazis did. Does using their research mean we approve? Would we be setting a dangerous precedent that inhumane means can be forgiven if the resulting knowledge saves lives? I don't want to do that! Using people as things, as a menas, treating them like they're nothing......that is never ok! Never ever ok!
I'm gonna go cry now.
Don't feel guilty - I have Jewish friends who have said the same thing as you, that if we can use the Nazi "research" to save people's lives, then we've turned the evil around and the lives lost are no longer meaningless. The important thing is that you know the past and are making the choice consciously, as opposed to being oblivious about where the information comes from.
ReplyDeletei watched a documentary on Auswich last week and i think the experiments that were done there were very wrong. i understand that they could provide information that wasnt known but the mistreatment of so many people overshadows that. it is very interesting though.
ReplyDeleteI think I'd really love your class. (It might be a little too controversial for my school.) It's also terrifying to think that some future neo-Nazi group might ally themselves with the Nazis, and hold them up as a group who made great strides in the field of neuroscience.
ReplyDeleteBut at the same time, no entity (Satan, perhaps, excluded) has done more to solidify its reputation as pure and unmitigated evil. Hopefully the medical field can take advantage of whatever information was obtained during the experiments without condoning the idea that human lives are a commodity, and can be used as a means to an end.
Yeah,I give up. I'm gonna go cry / pass out now. I hope you feel better tomorrow :(
So much of what we know is based off people in the past who did stupid/cruel/ignorant things, the way I think of it is if we don't use it, there are people that would wonder about it and maybe repeat the experiments because they want to know and care more about knowing than hurting people, so by using it instead of shoving it under the rug, there's no need for it to be repeated, we need to teach the history of it too to keep history from repeating itself. We took that tragedy and learned from it, put restrictions on scientists and experimenting, and that's good. We're keeping it from happening again.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of those questions for which there is no right answer. It's like orphaned homeless kids in Africa used as guinea pigs for American and European pharmaceutical companies--should we use the drugs that were tested on those kids? These kinds of issues make my head hurt. :/
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