Clara Tanone - Q10: Have their been many unacknowledged achievements due to immoral practices in the scientific field?

[Clara Tanone]

Hey everyone,

 

As I understand it war has been known to advance scientific progress immensely.

My question is, in WWII, what scientific discoveries did Germany, Japan, USA and other nations acquire?

Despite some experiments being unethical in nature, were there any scientific findings and discoveries that have been used immensely by today's scientists or built upon in any meaningful way?

Has a lot of good come from War which we have failed to give proper acknowledgement for due to any feelings of guilt or immorality in the process of doing so? Anyone have any thoughts?

 

Thanks,

Clara Tanone

[Phi for All]

Define immoral. Emergency appendectomy to save a person's life? Immoral if he's a Christian Scientist.

 

Some people actually think abortion is immoral.

[John Cuthber]

There is some data that was collected by truly atrocious means- notably by the Germans in WWII but they are a long way from being the only ones.

I believe that the usual view is that, if we do not use that data, those people died for nothing.

[Sensei]

1) nuclear fission.

 

2) tremendous advance in understanding of radioactivity, and it's influence on living organisms, mutations etc.

 

3) advance in rocket technology, leading to flight to Moon, and other cosmic objects and discoveries. Satellites.

 

I wish that peaceful cooperation of nations would lead to the same achievements in science and technology..

Edited November 9, 2015 by Sensei

[Nouveau]

Some of the most contraversial experiments conducted by the Nazi's, where today we are using and benefiting from the research, were the one's into the human body's resilience to extreme cold temperatures.

 

One of the problems the Nazi's had during world war 2 was a constant shortage of experienced pilots, thus it was decided to conduct research into the survivability rates for pilots and aircrews that ended up either by being shot down or ditching and ending up in the sea. One of the most serious issues was the extremely cold temperatures that these men would then be exposed to. Thus a program of illegal freezing experiments were conducted on prisoners from the concentration camps and in some cases allied POW's. In most cases the subjects of these experiments ended up dead having had to suffer terribly during the process.

 

Today still somewhat controversially much of the original data has ended up becoming part of our mainstream science and is referenced in over 45 seperate major works which are widely used for the treatment of hypothermia.

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2044.2004.04034.x/abstract;jsessionid=56AFFB67351954D796A152CDE574C491.f04t03

http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html

Edited November 10, 2015 by Nouveau