What Is Our Responsibility to Victims of Unethical Medical Experimentation?

Can we learn from other people’s suffering? Yes, but not in a way that legitimizes those who made them suffer.

Jewish twins were kept alive to be used in Josef Mengele’s medical experiments. These children from Auschwitz were liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. (Image in the public domain.)

I remember vividly the first time I learned about the Holocaust. I was in middle school in El Paso, Texas, and we went on a field trip to the local Holocaust Museum. Listening to what happened was horrifying to that young me. My early inclination toward science and medicine made me pay special attention to the unethical experimentation conducted by the Nazis, and that stuck to me. For me, it wasn’t so much experimentation. It was systematic torture. What could best be described as depraved individuals seemed to dream up different ways to torment and kill people, then passed off their actions as science.

My College Studies on the Holocaust

Later, I took an English course in college focused on researching and communicating a science concept. I picked medical experimentation during the Holocaust as my topic. It wasn’t easy. From victims being subjected to high-altitude simulations to study oxygen deprivation, to people submerged in ice baths for hours to observe the effects of hypothermia, the atrocities seemed endless.