Human Experimentation: Is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments?


Around the time 1930s, the Nazis would do many sorts of experiments, but these experiments were not due to animals, they were due to humans. These experiments were done for many reasons, for example, some were to “save the future” or “Increase the population”, and more.  One experiment was done in 1932 by Mengele, this experiment was done because he believed that twins with blonde hair and blue eyes can “save the future.” Mengele would always be in search of twins and when he got them they would be taken to a place where he would take care of them. That wasn’t all though after a while in with Mengele a truck would come in and pick up the twins and take them to a place where they performed the experiments. The experiments that were done on the twins were very gruesome because the twins were injected with diseases in their eyes, spines and they also had surgery including organ removal without anesthesia. After the experiments were due samples were taken and delivered to another person for further investigation. The twins did not have a choice of wanting to be used for test subjects, so to my question I believe that it is not ethical for the Nazis to use data from the experiments The kids or the parents did not give the Nazis their permission to do any sort of experiment, which causes their life because during these kinds of experiments many people died. I also don’t believe that the Nazis should use the data from the medical experiments because in the end for this specific experiment there was no point in it. The doctors only ended taking away 2800 lives away, because 3000 twins were take away from their parents and only 200 survived. But at the same time, I would say that it is ethical for the Nazis to use the medical experiment data to analyze it and see what went wrong so the doctors won’t have to gather any more data by harming more people. Back to the question, back in the late 1980s, a researcher stated that the data was critical to improving methods on reviving people and rescue people. It is and not ethical to use data from the Nazi experiments because the researchers are using data without the person’s formation, knowing that. Henrietta was a woman who got a rare type of cancer that would clone itself. The cancer cells would divide for years because Henrietta Lacks had rare cancer the doctors wanted to get more data from her, but the thing is that the doctors never told Henrietta that they were using data to research on them. The Doctors and the other people that were working with them were making money off it. The data that the researchers got from her and her family were very successful, from the data that they got, got them famous and much richer, so the doctors were using the family and were not trying to help. The family kept going back to the clinic to give away samples form themselves because the doctors lied to them saying that they had something wrong in their blood and obviously the family believed it because not enough information was given out to them. So it is not ethical to use data from the Nazi experiment because the people did not give them their permission to use their information.


Practical Ethics, This quote explains about if researchers should use data from the Nazi experiment. In this article, it briefly talks about the dates that happened during the Nazi research. The article also includes links.

CC BY-SA 4.0 Is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments? by Velvet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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1 Comment
  1. Jack E 6 months ago

    Its Ethical to use the data but not to conduct the tests. Its like if some one gave you $5 and then ran away, you wouldn’t just leave the the money there would you or would you use it to donate to science. You would donate right? RIGHT!?!?!?

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