"We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance so much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as the Nazi researchers did."
Paul Nitze
Changing the Future?
How will this lead us to the future?
After hearing the evidence against the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg trials, the judges adopted 10 guidelines to prevent future unethical research. Informed consent, the first of the recommendations, remains the keystone of medical studies. But the scientific community still hasn't reached a consensus on how to treat valid scientific data that was obtained unethically. Most journals do not maintain blanket prohibitions on citations of Nazi data, but researchers have seen their articles rejected for referencing Rascher's studies.
Was it worth it?
Is the data and information from the human trials actually used today?
Concentration camp doctors conducted research on vaccines, antibiotics, fertility, transplantation, and eugenics. The majority of those experiments were either useless, scientifically unsound, or duplicative.
More interesting was a series of studies on the limits of human endurance: At the Dachau concentration camp in 1942, Nazi doctor Sigmund Rascher submerged approximately 300 naked victims in ice water for two to five hours and monitored their heart rate, muscle control, and core temperature, and he noted when the subjects lost consciousness. (His stated goal was to see how long a downed pilot could survive in the North Sea.) More than 80 of the prisoners died during the experiments; nevertheless, some argue that Rascher's data are valuable and irreproducible.
Dozens of medical journal articles have cited the research, which has played a minor role in the development of survival suits for cold-water fishing boats and warming techniques for hypothermia patients.
None of the other concentration camp experiments proved useful in any way. Many of the results were predictable, like the fact that imprisoned Gypsies could not survive on salt water alone for 12 days. Other projects, like Josef Mengele's attempts to increase the multiple birth rate among Aryans, were utter failures, while research on mass sterilization would be of no use to modern doctors if it ever did produce substantive data.
The few concentration camp tests that pursued worthwhile ends, like testing the safety of novel antibiotics, were being duplicated elsewhere under humane conditions and with more reliable results.
​
Real World
Has this happened again?
Yes! Doctors who helped the CIA torture Guantanamo Bay detainees violated medical ethics standards, according to a report released in 2010. The doctors, who recommended that the CIA use saline solution for water-boarding rather than regular water, are alleged to have conducted "experiments" on nonconsenting human subjects. That's a violation of a host of medical ethics standards, including the 1947 Nuremburg Medical Code that was formulated in response to gruesome Nazi research on Jews, Gypsies, and captured enemy soldiers. Leaving aside the question of medical ethics, did any useful science ever come out of Nazi experiments on unwilling subjects?
The answer is, very little.
