> 3. Proceeding from the premise that an embryo
>is in fact a legitimate human life, we have to
>grapple with post-WWII ethics and the inevitable
>comparison with the genocide carried out by Nazi
>Germany. A scientific committee after the war
>emphatically denied the rightness of using
>medical research obtained from inhumane
>experiments on Jewish prisoners. To use it,
>they argued, was to tacitly support the butchery
>that made that research possible, and to open
>the door to an ethic of exploiting the helpless
>for the benefit of the powerful. Their
>conclusion, in my judgement, was entirely
>correct.

Do these controversial issues pop up all the time or is it a coincidence that I always seem to run into these debates everytime I make one of my rather haphazard forum visits?

Anyway, my take on this is rather the opposite of Issachar's (this one point, that is. I'm not going to get into the stem cell research issue if I can help it). Knowledge is neither good nor evil. Certainly the way this knowledge was gained was evil. But to me, I think denying the use of the knowledge gained from this evil research is the same as telling the victims that not only were you cruely treated, not only were you unethically and immorally tortured, beaten, gassed, murdered and butchered at the hands of the Nazis, but we're also going to refuse to use the one bit of useful information that might have come out of the whole ordeal; ignore the silver lining of the pitch black cloud, so to speak. I think we're allowing our emotions to rule our ethics by NOT using this kind of research. Knowledge is knowledge. To deny the use of certain knowledge because we find the way it was gained distasteful is to deny the one useful thing that might have resulted from the horrible situation.

The bigger point, though, is how good any of that research was in the first place. From what I've heard, Nazi eugenicists weren't exactly greatly methodical researchers. They were more akin to haphazard butchers. In that case, their "research" probably isn't much good anyway.

-- Dave