What is your opinion about using medical knowledge obtained in atrocities such as the WWII Holocaust?

Yes, the means should be condemned and everything possible should be done to keep such things from happening again. A bit ago there was a row over whether or not to use medical/anatomical knowledge obtained by the Nazis.

Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz are just one example of this. Very little of use came out of these things, however, some did. During the same period, Japan had its own version for “medical experiments”: Unit 731 , and other similar Units.

I mentioned the WWII Holocaust because that is the currently best known of such things. America did similar in 1932 to 1972 on a much smaller scale: Tuskegee syphilis experiment . I have no doubt that Germany, Japan, and America are not the only nations that have done such things.

I believe that to discard any valuable medical/anatomical knowledge obtained by such vile methods would be to make the deaths of these people completely useless. I condemn anyone who would do such things to, if I were religious (which I am not), the pits of Hell and my belief that such knowledge should be used does not indicate support of such vileness.

I have expressed this opinion before and been told that I have no right to say this because I have not lost family to such things (the average person thinks that Jews were the ones slaughtered in the Holocaust and I am not a Jew). To head this off, I shall tell you something of my family history:

My people were one of the two peoples in the actual Final Solution and Mengele had a, shall we say, fondness for Gypsies. This is not a good thing. Part of my family was slaughtered in the camps and I would not be surprised if they wound up on Mengele’s tables.