MrBishop
Well-Known Member
Before the downfall of the Third Reich and the death of Hitler, before the victories in the fields of France and the skies over England, the Third Reich was fighting a different battle altogether...Cancer!
Hitler, a devout anti-smoker, lost his mother to breast-cancer in 1907 and began the engine that turned into the anti-cancer medical research of the 30's and 40's. Armed with the world's most sophisticated tobacco-disease epidemiology--they were the first to link smoking to lung cancer definitively--Nazi doctors were especially passionate about the hazards of tobacco
The Nazi doctors fought their war against cancer on many fronts, battling environmental and workplace hazards (restrictions on the use of asbestos) and recommending food standards (bans on carcinogenic pesticides and food dyes) and early detection ("men were advised to get their colons checked as often as they would check the engines of their cars...")
Some of their success can be attributed to hard work, and some can be attributed to human-testing. When the war was over, all medical records kept by Nazi scientists were locked up in an effort to protect the memories of the innocents that died during the research process.
Here's the issue: With the amount of research that was done locked up, and therefore useless to mankind, all the lives lost during the research died for no reason. We cannot reproduce, for humanitarian reasons, the extent of research accomplished by German scientists and doctors during those years.
Should the records be opened up so that some good can be taken from the evil that happened during the Nazi era?
Hitler, a devout anti-smoker, lost his mother to breast-cancer in 1907 and began the engine that turned into the anti-cancer medical research of the 30's and 40's. Armed with the world's most sophisticated tobacco-disease epidemiology--they were the first to link smoking to lung cancer definitively--Nazi doctors were especially passionate about the hazards of tobacco
The Nazi doctors fought their war against cancer on many fronts, battling environmental and workplace hazards (restrictions on the use of asbestos) and recommending food standards (bans on carcinogenic pesticides and food dyes) and early detection ("men were advised to get their colons checked as often as they would check the engines of their cars...")
Some of their success can be attributed to hard work, and some can be attributed to human-testing. When the war was over, all medical records kept by Nazi scientists were locked up in an effort to protect the memories of the innocents that died during the research process.
Here's the issue: With the amount of research that was done locked up, and therefore useless to mankind, all the lives lost during the research died for no reason. We cannot reproduce, for humanitarian reasons, the extent of research accomplished by German scientists and doctors during those years.
Should the records be opened up so that some good can be taken from the evil that happened during the Nazi era?
