IndexHistorical contextReasons for the experimentsAnswerHistorical resultConclusionDuring World War II, a number of German doctors, geneticists, psychiatrists and anthropologists behaved torturously and often deadly experiments on thousands of unwilling concentration camp prisoners. These experiments were conducted primarily to research the survival of military personnel, the testing of treatments and drugs, and the advancement of Nazi racial ideology. On the one hand, these experiments were simply another method of imposing torture and mass murder. However, they also represent an apprehensive moral challenge. Scientists, historians and commentators on the 1947 Nuremberg trials have argued this; if some medical experiments produced relevant and scientifically valid results, would it be justifiable, and above all ethical, to use that data for modern medical purposes? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Historical Context From 1933 to the height of World War II, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, introduced and aggressively pursued a racial ideology that asserted the “Aryan race” of pure, healthy Germans above ethnic groups deemed inferior . The Nazi Party sought to put this ideology of racial supremacy into practice by preventing Germans from integrating with what they considered inferior races, as well as encouraging the increase in the number of children born to pure Aryan Germans and enslaving other races, such as as Slavs, or eliminating them completely, as in the case of the Jews. As part of the ideology, the Nazis antagonized and aggressively persecuted these peoples in pursuit of racial purity in Germany and the territories they occupied. Gypsies, Slavs, Poles, disabled people, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and especially Jews were persecuted and subsequently exterminated during the Holocaust. It was within the Nazi concentration camps that the ideology of the “master race” was systematically extended and deadly experiments were conducted on some prisoners. Experiments included the sterilization of imprisoned women, to study methods of limiting the birth of future children of "inferior" people, as well as the infamous experiments performed by Josef Mengele on twins at Auschwitz. Gruesome experiments performed without anesthesia were conducted regularly in numerous concentration camps, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mauthausen concentration camps in Austria. Motivations for the Experiments Experimentation on Nazi concentration camp prisoners occurred for three central reasons: to investigate the survival of military, testing drugs and treatments, and promoting racial and ideological goals based on racial superiority used to justify the subjugation or elimination of perceived racial enemies. Most of the experiments conducted within the concentration camps were carried out with the intent of preserving and aiding the German army. Experiments were conducted to discover means of adapting human anatomy in order to improve military standards or to discover means of rehabilitating wounded soldiers. Many experiments were tested to find out whether diseases such as malaria and altitude sickness could be combated, and it was through these tests that hundreds of concentration camp prisoners were subjected to gruesome experiments. Bone, muscle and nerve regeneration and transplantation have also been studied, where sections of bone, muscle or nerve were removed from subjects without anesthesia, resulting inmany subjects suffer severe agony and permanent mutilation. Frostbite and hypothermia experiments were completed to simulate the conditions of military units fighting on the Eastern Front. The subjects were forced to sit in tubs containing freezing water for up to three hours or left naked in the open air in temperatures as low as -6 degrees Celsius. Similar experiments were conducted on captured Russian soldiers to study whether their genetics resulted in superior resistance to the cold. Experiments were also conducted to test and examine newly developed drugs and treatments to be used to treat nursing illnesses or injuries. In the German concentration camps of Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen, doctors performed experiments on prisoners to study immunization methods for the prevention, containment and treatment of various contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid , hepatitis and typhoid fever. During the malaria test, subjects were infected by mosquitoes, or through injections containing traces of malaria, then treated with numerous drugs to test their respective ability to fight the disease. Experiments on the effects of mustard gas and the effectiveness of various treatments of wounds caused by the gas were conducted in Natzweiler and Sachsenhausen. The subjects were exposed to the gas, causing chemical burns, which doctors then studied to find the best possible solution. The gruesome experiments performed were believed to have beneficial results for the German army in the fight against contagious diseases that could be contracted during combat. Furthermore, a large amount of experiments performed served to promote belief in Nazi ideology and the superiority of the Aryan race. Race of the Germans. Many conducted aimed at investigating heredity, in an attempt to demonstrate that the genetic composition of other races, such as Jews and Slavs, was inferior to that of Germans. The most infamous of the doctors who performed these experiments was the head physician of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, who became known as the “Angel of Death.” Mengele was a very significant figure during the Holocaust, famous for performing brutal experiments on prisoners in an attempt to consolidate the Aryan race's vision of domination over inferior peoples. Mengele was virtually given free will, as head physician, to conceive and perform any medical procedure he deemed beneficial to both the war effort and Nazi ideology. With the seemingly limitless supply of condemned prisoners at his disposal, Mengele took a particular interest in the twins. Experiments were conducted on nearly 1500 pairs of twins, excluding the use of anesthesia, including mass blood transfusions, lethal injections, organ removal, castration and amputations, as well as homicides. Some prisoners were stuck with a needle that pierced their hearts and then injected with gasoline or chloroform, causing blood clotting and atrocious deaths. Others were frozen alive in vats of ice water or burned with phosphorus, all in an effort to understand human anatomy and heredity. Mengele's eye experiments included attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects, and he killed people with heterochromatic (different-colored) eyes so that the eyes could be removed and sent to Berlin for study. Another infamous concentration The camp doctor was Aribert Heim, infamously known as “Doctor Death”. Heim was a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he performed often fatal operations on prisoners to examine treatments, solutions and organs. Heim injected into the subjects' heartslethal solutions, including petrol and phenol, to understand which killed faster, and organ harvesting was performed on live subjects without anesthesia, who were then left to die on operating tables. Heim attempted these experiments with the aspiration of assisting the war effort by understanding human anatomy. AnswerArguments against the use of dataTo a considerably large extent, it would be unethical to cite or use any data produced by human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps. In his opening statement at the trial of twenty-three former Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg Trials, Chief Counsel Telford Taylor stated: “the experiments have revealed nothing of any use to civilian medicine.” Throughout the trial, Taylor successfully challenged the defendants, claiming that their practices were “scientifically useless,” a perspective that most commentators studying Nazi experiments have echoed or supported. Don Wilkinson, an Oxford medical ethicist, says that "it is important to say that these findings very rarely provide important key information in isolation." Due to the appallingly unethical nature of the experiments, the general consensus is that using any data would subsequently be unethical. Such data, obtained illegally and deemed inadmissible, if cited and used, “will corrupt the very institution of medicine,” as stated by anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher. Furthermore, a number of ethical codes and theories reinforce the belief that data found should ultimately be destroyed for no future use. One of these is Kantian ethics, theorized by Immanuel Kant, which mainly holds that one should never harm another to gain something. When carrying out the experiments, Nazi doctors did not recognize or respect the inherent integrity or dignity of each individual and instead treated Jewish prisoners as expendable laboratory rats, thus treating them as tangible objects, rather than human beings. Sarah Wilson, a professor of bioethics at Cedarville University in Ohio, argues that scientists should not use the only remaining vestiges of Nazi prisoners. Wilson said in a 2011 report that treating data as a commodity would only serve to “further devalue human life.” Since scientists are unable to separate the raw data from the method by which it was produced, it is arguable that the data should not be referenced, primarily to avoid associating contemporary medical practices with unethical methodologies and bigoted biases. Furthermore, the use of data, regardless of whether practiced with moral intent, could stimulate or revitalize equally unethical experiments, thus affirming the validity of experiments conducted within concentration camps. Arguments in Support of Using Data The main argument in favor of using Nazi research contests that citing data can provide scientifically valid references and data that could be used to better understand certain diseases and the conduct of contemporary medical practices. Utilitarianism, related to the concept of achieving “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” does not support the techniques by which the data were obtained, since unethical and impermissible procedures and torture do not qualify as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. However, because the data exists and the methods by which it was produced are now mostly avoidable, it is plausible to suggest that applying the data to understand and further develop treatments for some diseases would be scientifically beneficial. Jay Katz, a doctorAmerican from Yale University, argued in Arthur Caplan's 1992 collaborative book, When Medicine Went Mad, that preserving lives and promoting medical care using data can "redeem" the atrocities of the Holocaust in a "small way." However, Katz also argued that by accepting the data as legitimate, it "opens the door" for doctors to later conduct and justify any future underhanded research procedures. Additionally, a number of scientists have referenced and used Nazi John research S. Hayward, a hypothermia expert at the University of Victoria in Vancouver, believes the data is conventional and “necessary” for his work. Hayward refers to measurements of body cooling rates of Nazi experimenters when testing survival suits in water freezing temperatures in Canada. Hayward said in a 1984 interview conducted by Kristina Moe that he "doesn't want to use the research, but there is no other and there will be no other in an ethical world." Hayward went on to say that he had “rationalized” his use of the data in an effort to “do something constructive with it.” Moe also interviewed former U.S. Army Medical Corps major Leo Alexander, who evaluated the Nazis' hypothermia experiments and concluded that they had been conducted in a "reliable manner." Nazi experiments involving auditory trauma, low pressure, and high altitude were also rated as relatively consistent. However, it is highly unlikely that a modern participant would volunteer for ruptured eardrums due to low pressure or high altitude. Therefore, the experiments mentioned above cannot be replicated, and therefore the results produced by Nazi doctors cannot be disputed or compared. A pragmatic approach to the topic suggests that using research produced by Nazi doctors does not condone the methodology behind the experiments. experiments, especially because the results do not constitute a separate moral entity. A small number of doctors, including author Robert Pozos, argue that the data exists simply as numbers and cannot henceforth be morally harmful. However, since experiments can never be legally repeated, the data must be correlated with their methodological origin from a scientific point of view, and therefore scientists cannot simply treat the results as morally impartial statistics to justify the application of the data into modernized practices. Historic Achievement After the 1947 Nuremberg Trials, the Nuremberg Code is established; legislation consisting of ten regulations regarding the conduct of human experimentation. The most important points included in the Code state that all participants must explicitly provide consent when undergoing experiments and must understand any potential risks or side effects that the experiments may induce. The Code also outlined the rules for the conduct of any human experiment, in particular, granting participants permission to discontinue their participation at any time. Doctors must also stop the experiment if they believe it is harmful, and no experiment may be conducted if the perceived risks outweigh the scientific or statistical benefits. Numerous separate codifications were established that expanded the principles established in the Nuremberg Code, including the Belmont Report, the Common Rule, and the Declaration of Helsinki. While there has been progress in the development and oversight of these principles, such as the introduction of electronic signatures, the cardinal goal of managing ethical clinical procedures and protecting participants has remained relevant. Please note: this is just an example. Get a document..