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Comment by cabaalis | Hacker News Reader

I don't know any specific examples, but I wonder how much of our knowledge today came from people working under these conditions. It's terrible, but do we now retain knowledge learned from people experimenting on humans under Hitler, for example? How many warfare techniques were developed by kings or other absolute leaders asking engineers to build novel weapons with no constraints?

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Most of those 'experiments' were rubbish from a scientific point of view: they were mostly sadistic torture. Eg the things Mengele did.

Yes, there is certain knowledge we could gain by ethically unconstrained experimenting. But the Nazis did not gain much of that.

On a more positive note, religious preferences sometimes gives us willing subjects. Eg the Jehova's Witnesses don't like blood transfusions but do agree with surgery. So surgeon get to come up and practice blood-transfusion-less procedures. (No ethics committee would let you get away with trying these out otherwise when they are still in the alpha phase.)

Thanks to the Nazis, I know my maximum time to survive in freezing water is about eight minutes. That can't be the only example.

The accuracy of those studies has been questioned and the ethics of using that data, independent of their accuracy, debated, extensively.

When I got my scuba certification, my instructor told me very clearly how the data for the recommended decompression curves got collected.

That's really not correct.

http://gcaptain.com/cold_water/

Interesting find!

I also did some recreational ice swimming (and read much more about other maniacs who do it regularly): so I can totally see how hypothermia does not kick in as quickly as people think it would.

Yes we did. A lot of textbooks on human anatomy are from that time.

There is even an ethical issues section on the wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

I'm not sure that you've provided evidence for the extraordinary claim that textbooks on human anatomy are based on Nazi experiments.

True. I was grossly exaggerating.

I was thinking of Pernkopf's anatomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Pernkopf) when i was making the comment. It is not true to say textbooks are based on his work.

But apparently his work is used in books. The argument is that it we use results and data from nazi experiments.

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