Post by account_disabled on Mar 10, 2024 3:40:35 GMT
In 2019 it will be 50 years since man landed on the moon. This is a historic milestone carried out by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard Apollo XI. This is one of the greatest feats in human history. Could it be tainted by controversy?
When a news station called aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun brilliant, it was harshly criticized for failing to mention that the man was a Nazi. Without his technology, this historic milestone would not have existed, and although it may have come several years later, we cannot know if the world would be where it is today.
Wars are often the source of great technological advances. Is it ethical to use them later for global progress?
That is the approach that Frank Swaine makes in this column published for the BBC. We transcribe below so you can keep an eye on it. Tell us your opinion in the comments.
In search of a local angle on the 50th anniversary Chile Mobile Number List of man's landing on the Moon, Washington DC news station WTOP published a glowing biography of the "brilliant" aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who was buried near the city of Alexandria in Virginia, United States, in 1977.
However, the article caused great controversy and was quickly removed. The reason? That it had not been mentioned that he was a Nazi.
There are few corners of scientific progress that have not been marred, at some point in their history, by immoral or unethical behavior.
Physics, biology, zoology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, genetics, nutrition, engineering... All are plagued with discoveries made in circumstances that can be described as unethical and even illegal.
How should we feel about making use of that knowledge, especially when it could be of great help to civilization and even save lives?
von Braun's presence in the Apollo program was not an outlier.
More than 120 German scientists and engineers joined him, including fellow SS officer Kurt Debus (who became director of NASA's Launch Operations Center) and Bernhard Tessmann (designer of the colossal assembly building). space vehicle vertical at what is now the Kennedy Space Center).
They were among 1,600 scientists who were recruited by spies at the end of World War II , as part of Operation Paperclip , which granted them protection from possible prosecution and safe passage into the United States and permission to pursue their work.
Controversial contributions
The Allied forces also made use of other Nazi innovations.
Nerve agents such as tabun and sarin (which would spur the development of new insecticides as well as weapons of mass destruction), the antimalarial chloroquine, methadone and methamphetamines, medical research on hypothermia, hypoxia, dehydration, and more were all produced from of experiments on humans carried out in concentration camps.
Chipboard, some forms of synthetic rubber, and Fanta soft drink were also developed by the Germans under the Nazi regime.
But this was far from an exceptional case of unethical research in the history of science.
For 40 years, starting in 1932, researchers at Tuskegee University in Alabama tracked the progress of syphilis in hundreds of poor black men, none of whom had ever received a diagnosis or treatment, even though the antibiotic penicillin that could cure the disease was already available at that time.
In a related study, American doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected patients with sexually transmitted infections to study these diseases. Aware of the scandal that this could cause, the experiments were carried out in Guatemala.
From 1955 to 1976, in what became known as "The Unfortunate Experiment," hundreds of women with precancerous lesions were left untreated to see if they developed cervical cancer . Details of the study only came to light after a complaint from two women's health advocates, Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle.
The study, which was carried out in New Zealand, wanted to test some theories about the importance of early intervention, but a subsequent investigation into this research carried out by Judge Silvia Cartwright criticized the treatment of the patients by the doctors who carried out the study.
The polio vaccine, along with many other medical advances, owes its existence to human cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent.
She never received any compensation. The cell line grown from those initial samples has been used in countless research on drugs, toxins, viruses and also to study the human genome.
In the 1950s, Robert G Heath pioneered the use of electrodes implanted in the brain in an attempt to change sexual orientation . Today, similar technology is used as a treatment for epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, and the neural cord recently announced by Elon Musk.
ethical dilemma
It is not controversial to say that these experiments should never have happened . But now that they happened, what should be done with the information obtained?
"The basic intuition is that if information was obtained unethically and we use that information, then we become complicit in that past action," says Dom Wilkinson, a specialist in Medical Ethics at the University of Oxford.
This is a fairly common view, even among those who make use of such findings.
In the bioethics journal The Hastings Center Report , in 1984, Kristine Moe recounts a conversation she had with John Hayward, a leading hypothermia expert at the University of Victoria in Canada who used Nazi data in his studies.
"I don't want to have to use this information, but there is no other information and there won't be any other information in an ethical world," he said. «I have justified it a little. But not using it would be equally bad.
But Hayward's experience was unusual.
"I think it's important to say that these findings rarely provide key information in isolation," Wilkinson says. "For the most part, scientific information is like a puzzle piece: it fits into an overall puzzle."
When a news station called aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun brilliant, it was harshly criticized for failing to mention that the man was a Nazi. Without his technology, this historic milestone would not have existed, and although it may have come several years later, we cannot know if the world would be where it is today.
Wars are often the source of great technological advances. Is it ethical to use them later for global progress?
That is the approach that Frank Swaine makes in this column published for the BBC. We transcribe below so you can keep an eye on it. Tell us your opinion in the comments.
In search of a local angle on the 50th anniversary Chile Mobile Number List of man's landing on the Moon, Washington DC news station WTOP published a glowing biography of the "brilliant" aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who was buried near the city of Alexandria in Virginia, United States, in 1977.
However, the article caused great controversy and was quickly removed. The reason? That it had not been mentioned that he was a Nazi.
There are few corners of scientific progress that have not been marred, at some point in their history, by immoral or unethical behavior.
Physics, biology, zoology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, genetics, nutrition, engineering... All are plagued with discoveries made in circumstances that can be described as unethical and even illegal.
How should we feel about making use of that knowledge, especially when it could be of great help to civilization and even save lives?
von Braun's presence in the Apollo program was not an outlier.
More than 120 German scientists and engineers joined him, including fellow SS officer Kurt Debus (who became director of NASA's Launch Operations Center) and Bernhard Tessmann (designer of the colossal assembly building). space vehicle vertical at what is now the Kennedy Space Center).
They were among 1,600 scientists who were recruited by spies at the end of World War II , as part of Operation Paperclip , which granted them protection from possible prosecution and safe passage into the United States and permission to pursue their work.
Controversial contributions
The Allied forces also made use of other Nazi innovations.
Nerve agents such as tabun and sarin (which would spur the development of new insecticides as well as weapons of mass destruction), the antimalarial chloroquine, methadone and methamphetamines, medical research on hypothermia, hypoxia, dehydration, and more were all produced from of experiments on humans carried out in concentration camps.
Chipboard, some forms of synthetic rubber, and Fanta soft drink were also developed by the Germans under the Nazi regime.
But this was far from an exceptional case of unethical research in the history of science.
For 40 years, starting in 1932, researchers at Tuskegee University in Alabama tracked the progress of syphilis in hundreds of poor black men, none of whom had ever received a diagnosis or treatment, even though the antibiotic penicillin that could cure the disease was already available at that time.
In a related study, American doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected patients with sexually transmitted infections to study these diseases. Aware of the scandal that this could cause, the experiments were carried out in Guatemala.
From 1955 to 1976, in what became known as "The Unfortunate Experiment," hundreds of women with precancerous lesions were left untreated to see if they developed cervical cancer . Details of the study only came to light after a complaint from two women's health advocates, Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle.
The study, which was carried out in New Zealand, wanted to test some theories about the importance of early intervention, but a subsequent investigation into this research carried out by Judge Silvia Cartwright criticized the treatment of the patients by the doctors who carried out the study.
The polio vaccine, along with many other medical advances, owes its existence to human cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent.
She never received any compensation. The cell line grown from those initial samples has been used in countless research on drugs, toxins, viruses and also to study the human genome.
In the 1950s, Robert G Heath pioneered the use of electrodes implanted in the brain in an attempt to change sexual orientation . Today, similar technology is used as a treatment for epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, and the neural cord recently announced by Elon Musk.
ethical dilemma
It is not controversial to say that these experiments should never have happened . But now that they happened, what should be done with the information obtained?
"The basic intuition is that if information was obtained unethically and we use that information, then we become complicit in that past action," says Dom Wilkinson, a specialist in Medical Ethics at the University of Oxford.
This is a fairly common view, even among those who make use of such findings.
In the bioethics journal The Hastings Center Report , in 1984, Kristine Moe recounts a conversation she had with John Hayward, a leading hypothermia expert at the University of Victoria in Canada who used Nazi data in his studies.
"I don't want to have to use this information, but there is no other information and there won't be any other information in an ethical world," he said. «I have justified it a little. But not using it would be equally bad.
But Hayward's experience was unusual.
"I think it's important to say that these findings rarely provide key information in isolation," Wilkinson says. "For the most part, scientific information is like a puzzle piece: it fits into an overall puzzle."