well, he is correct.
That is what among other things, ethics is supposed to do. hold back science from doing things that would be bad. you know?
Yeah, otherwise you get some real assholes doing experiments on pregnant women and twins.
I think it’s a discussion worth having, so long as both sides realize there needs to be lines drawn.
So, this has actually been one of those things often claimed, you may have heard of it or maybe even thought it yourself (I certainly had the thought as an edgy teen). Stuff like “For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps” or similar things.
Now, beside the point of it being unacceptable to do so ethically - the stuff done there was also quite useless. I currently can’t do the work of searching for and gathering all the sources again, but to my memory: the cruelty and dismissal of humanity made the “results” of those “studies” mostly useless garbage, saying nothing at all worthwhile for science, and being clearly tainted ideologically.
Because, while you may think that in some “ideal” world, you could have neutral research on unwilling humans, the reality has always been, that the conditions needed to get humans to do such experiments on other humans, necessitate the kind of ideological distortions, that mostly make the results useless in the end. There’s simply not enough psychopaths that are also willing to do proper, frustrating, hard-work-necessitating, non-self-aggrandising research - and to get non-psychopaths to do it, you need an ideology that ultimately removes their neutrality and the neutrality of the research.
The only things I remember being deemed “useful” and “properly” done from a scientific perspective in the recovered “studies” were things like “lethality of grenades by proximity to the explosion” - something that is questionable to begin with in value and that can also be determined with sensors of different kinds - as well as “effects of massive hypothermia and frostbites” - which as far as I remember basically just confirmed what has been estimated from case studies in a broader way, as well as animal studies (the latter, admittedly, have their own legitimate controversy).
For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps.
They did. Read about Unit 731. Unquestionably inhumane experiments yielded breakthroughs in human-pathogen interactions that substantially advanced the field. However, it goes without question that no amount of knowledge justified the means.
https://www.pacificatrocities.org/human-experimentation.html
I did, and from what I heard, it is a big myth that the results were actually as useful as the first assessment on discovery of them had been. Later studies have, as far as I know, been much more sobering as to the “usefulness” of the data acquired there.
The website you link also immediately shows the problem (even in presentation, presenting them quite sensationalist, immediately highlighting, that there is no possibility of neutrality in assessing the results): The “cruelty for cruelty’s sake” in the conditions of the experiments cannot easily be removed from the results. Making the data in the end only useful for very specific circumstances, and hard to untangle. Lets take venereal diseases for example - it ultimately shows how they spread and interact in conditions of forced mass rape under conditions of extreme squalor, as documented by people not engaged in proper double-blind environments. The usefulness of that is not as high as the myth surrounding Unit 731 or Mengele’s experiments might suggest - and as your linked website also shows, there is a material interest in selling that myth of “forbidden, evil experiments resulting in knowledge”.
It’s more like the truth lands somewhere in between. The people making the argument of “despite the lack of morality, Unit 731 gave us a lot of useful research and advanced human knowledge!” have the same type of mindset as the ones saying “literally nothing Unit 731 did is worth anything. It is all 100% useless and we shouldn’t spend any time looking at any of it!”.
Essentially, both of these groups started with a conclusion and worked backwards from there. One wants desperately to believe that at least something worthwhile came from all that evil, the other wants desperately to believe that evil like that couldn’t possibly produce anything of value.
It’s just an attempt to rationalize the absolute atrocities that Unit 731 was allowed to commit. Either by saying it was for some “greater good”, or by saying they weren’t scientists at all and there was no purpose other than the cruelty.
Can we insist that he put his money where his mouth is and be the first of his own victims er I mean test subjects
His experiments were successful, so. At least he’s not the Green Goblin
Guess this guy Ioves the experiments the Imperial Japanese Army did on Chinese people.
You wont believe what this guy did :) Ding Ding Ding!!! Human experiments on babies.
Did Twitter in retweets not display the added context at the bottom which says this particular doctor illegally expirimented on infants and served prison time?
Yeah, but he did it to make the child resistant to illness. That’s a worthy cause.
I genuinely cannot tell how old this person is. Could be anywhere from 25-65.
He looks 40-45. Being Asian doesn’t make you immortal (although I’m jealous of their skin).
Edit: according to wikipedia he’s 40-41, so I was right on the money :P
being Asian doesn’t make you immortal
Lame
Xianxia lied to me?
Could be that Dr. He has a picture of Dr Mengele sitting at his table…
deleted by creator
What a shame you fuckers aren’t allowed to kill off humanity with yet another experiment gone bad.
Do you want vault-tec? Cuz this is how you get vault-tec.
Right? That dude even has an uncanny resemblance to the potato headed NPCs in FO3 and FONV!
I think this is a parody account, I think I saw some other wild comment and there it showed the account was branded as parody
No, that post is real and the guy is a sentenced criminal.
It seems I confused the real person with the parody account
I see, the posts are similar enough, so you are forgiven :D
I cracked up when I realized this wasn’t from the meme account
b-but it has a blue checkmark!
The bureaucracy of a typical ethics review is insane and it neither helps design ethical experiments or set boundaries, it’s just paperwork concerned with font type. there’s more truth to this than we’d like, which is not ok.
then it’s not “ethics” holding progress, but “bureaucracy”, or “lack of correct collaboration and processes on review boards”, is it?
Oh yeah sure it’s not the ethics thats actually the problem. I think everybody agrees on the need for a strict ethical framework.
But most of the research institutions that I have been involved with have cared very little about the actual ethical constraints of research (such as data privacy or survey questions that could be triggering) But every single time they will pull you up on the font being too aggressive, whatever that means.
I can’t speak for regions other than my own however.
Unfortunately it’s necessary, or you get people running experiments on children. We just can’t seem to rely on people to do the right thing, or perhaps they lose sight of it. Tunnel vision is real.
Well it’s true
Ethics does not. A case against archaic morality can be made, but not Ethics.
