I think that the answers is obvious. It is not wrong to use the cure.
I am just curious to know if anybody thinks otherwise.
I watched a program looking at this issue. The main argument used against using the cure was that it offended the dignity of the victims and therefore the recovered research should be destroyed.
Not SO obvious. Since it was the Nazis I can imagine “cures” like the unethical suggestion to a cancerous (or leprous was it?) Emperor Constantine that he should bathe in the blood of fresh killed infants. Story went that he refused and was later cured.
fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/saints/constantine_helen.htm < the story from a Russian Orthodox source. Medical ethics, not miracles, my point in posting.
That is to say even if such would seem to cure - it involves a sin and cannot ever be used.
BUT you probably had in mind a morally licit cure NOW, the knowledge of WHICH came about through unspeakably reprehensible means. In THAT case - when taking the cure
was not harming anyone or anything NOW - the worst consequence would be the justification of the method by which the cure was obtained. What to do then?
Perhaps use the cure, credit the victim of the horror as the hero, and when publicity
went forth about it recount the villiany of the perp with extreme prejudice.
Something like:
"A breakthrough in the treatment of HIV has been achieved at Herzen General Hospital in
Berlin thanks to the contribution of Meyer Goldberg a victim of Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele’s ghastly “medical experimentation” torture contrivances.
“It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” said Dr. Nobel Truehart, primary care physician for the
HIV patient. “While Mr. Goldberg died a helpless victim at Mengele’s hands, his immune system reacted in unforeseen ways to the torture. He died a fighter, and now his suffering
turns out not to have been in vain!”
Functionaries assisting at Mengele’s sessions dutifully took notes at the sham “medical experiments” most of which was used for political justification or publication in similarly
dubious wartime “Medical Journals”.
“Though rife with quackery some of these medical accounts contained cogent observations by Mengele’s medical functionaries, and the surprising strength of Mr. Goldberg’s immune system gave us a clue that led to this actual breakthrough in medicine,” Truehart said.
When asked about the ethics of using medical knowledge acquired in such circumstances,
Truhart defended his decision.
“My first duty is to my patients. My unique treatment was inspired by work which we later found used some of the experimental data from those torture sessions. We drew a gold nugget from a very dark mine I’d say.”
Truhart was hesitant to acknowledge Nazi medicine in any way however.
“In that many HIV victims today may have contacted their illness in ways that would have
led Nazi authorities to execute them - I don’t think I will credit them at all,” Truehart said.
“Instead let us honor the memory of Mr. Goldberg, whose suffering of injustice has turned out to be more meaningful than his reprehensible quackish captors could ever have imagined.”
