The Nazi hypothermia experiments: forbidden data?

Abstract

I was interested to read the editorial [1] concerning the Nazi hypothermia experiments. You were, not surprisingly in my view, taken aback by seeing the results of those experiments quoted in a lecture, without the lecturer making any reference to their brutal provenance. You later state in your editorial that ‘editors have in recent years universally steered clear of allowing the hypothermia results…to see the light of day.’ You further state that ‘it is this complicity (in Nazi torture), however peripheral, that stays the hand of the modern ethical researcher tempted to make use of such data.’ I presume that when you use the term ‘making use of such data’ you include repeating the materials, methods and results of Nazi experiments and debating the accuracy of the results of Nazi experiments. Your editorial, however, has described the materials, methods and results of the Nazi hypothermia experiments, and has gone on to debate the scientific results of the survival times of the hypothermia victims. The editorial gave a level of detail that was more than the minimum necessary to conduct a debate on the ethics and morality of their scientific use. On reading your editorial my scientific appetite was stimulated and I was tempted to look up the full text of the experiments from the references you provided. I have resisted this temptation so far, and will continue to resist it. As the lecturer's use of the results of these experiments was inappropriate, especially without clearly detailing their origin, it was also inappropriate to give scientific status to those experiments by detailing them and by debating their content in a scientific journal.