Posted on 09/09/2007 8:38:36 AM PDT by wagglebee
With the world on the precipice of a genetics revolution, the Holocaust Museum Houston is about to shine a spotlight on one of the lesser-known architects of Nazi Germany's attempt to create a master race: doctors.
In a new exhibit and lecture series, "Medical Ethics and the Holocaust," the museum tells the story of physicians' enthusiastic participation in the murder of their own patients, then explores whether science's powerful new tools could lead to a new eugenics movement.
"It's a warning shot across the bow," Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld, a Houston endocrinologist and the program's creator, said. "There'll always be a push for individuals, nations or races to dominate others — coming genetic capabilities will give them that potential more than ever before."
The lecture series kicks off tonight with a talk by James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose 1953 co-discovery of DNA's structure culminated this decade in the mapping of the human genome. The achievement is expected to revolutionize medicine, but it also brings apprehension because it could lead to designing babies with certain traits and aborting those with others.
The potential scenarios conjure up images of eugenics, the social philosophy, supported by many intellectual leaders in the early 20th century, that advocates the creation of healthier, more intelligent people. Under Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany took the idea to its extreme conclusion.
Watson heads an impressive roster of speakers, who include three Nobel laureates and such prominent figures as Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, and Leon Kass, the former director of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. Topics range from pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to euthanasia in the movies to performance-enhancing drugs in sports to the United States' history with eugenics.
The exhibit, "How Healing Becomes Killing," focuses on Germany's 1939-1945 euthanasia program — the "mercy deaths" that aimed to purge the country of its mentally and physically ill population.
Artifacts exhibited include patient prosthetics excavated from one of the killing centers; patient charts; a package of Luminal, one of the drugs doctors used to kill children born with disease or deformities; and one of the forms physicians signed to authorize the killing of institutionalized patients.
Josef Mengele, dubbed the "Angel of Death" for experiments carried out on prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp, may be the most well-known Nazi physician. He evaded capture for 34 years before dying in Brazil in 1979 following a stroke.
But the exhibit makes clear that such medical abuses and atrocities were widespread throughout the Third Reich. Included in the exhibit is film footage of the trial of three doctors who participated in the killing. All defended their actions as therapeutic.
"They thought they were healing the nation, ridding it of what was known at the time as 'life not worth living,' " said Cheyenne Martin, a bioethicist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and a member of the program's planning committee. "It was a horrific, unprecedented role by a medical community. They weren't forced into their roles. They were leaders."
Few physicians were punished for their roles. Among the most unsettling stories told by the exhibit involves Dr. Heinrich Gross, an Austrian neurologist involved in the killing of physically and mentally handicapped children. Gross went on to conduct and publish research on the brains of those children for which he was awarded Austria's Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975. He was stripped of the award in 2003.
The Nazi doctors' role in the Holocaust often is considered to have led to the modern bioethics movement, given the code that came out of Nuremberg that the voluntary consent of human subjects is essential to medical research. But bioethicists argue it took a long time for it to be widely implemented. The Tuskegee experiment, in which researchers studying how syphilis spread and killed black men who were denied treatment, continued until 1972.
The exhibit also depicts the United States' eugenics experience, the neutering of 40,000 people classified as insane or feebleminded in the first half of the century.
The 15-part lecture series concludes Jan. 22, with Methodist Hospital heart surgeon Dr. George Noon discussing the life-saving surgery he performed last year on 97-year-old Dr. Michael DeBakey.
There is a not-yet-determined fee for that lecture, but the others are free. Those who wish to attend must register in advance at the museum's Web site (www.hmh.org/medethics). Most lectures are at the museum Tuesdays at 6 p.m., but tonight's is at 7 at the University of Houston's Cullen Performance Hall.
And the culture of death is actively trying to bring it back today.
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Let me guess: is Leon Kass going to try to prove that birth control was one of the causes of Nazism?
Let me guess, you don’t think there is a link between birth control and eugenics?
“ridding it of what was known at the time as ‘life not worth living,’ “
an excuse still used by abortion supporters today.
Wait until the "gay gene" is discovered (if it is). Parents having the right to abort a child who might be "born gay" will be the ultimate Liberal dilemma. The Loony Left will defenestrate, trying to decide which cause to support -- abortion or gay rights!
1) Abortion, cloning, etc. will be seen as bad things and will be increasingly rejected by our society.
OR
2) People will say 'The Nazis were actually right about a lot of this stuff. maybe we should give their philosophy a second chance'.
If I had to guess, I think Option 2 is more likely. Sigh.
Option 2 is what the culture of death is trying now. They get very testy when their connection to Nazism is brought up, and try to reject the comparison out of hand.
It makes more sense for us to expose it for what it is and hopefully the minds and hearts of society will change.
Eugenics was first thought up by Sir Francis Galton (the cousin of Chas. Darwin) in 1865 and peaked in popularity in the 1930s. It was seen as essential to creating an Earthly paradise (New Jerusalem), in idealistic religions; and in the secular equivalent in socialist realism.
It has many elements, including the culling or sterilization of human “defectives”, selective breeding, social control and manipulation, ethnic cleansing, and both genetics and pseudo-genetics (such as the experiments of Trofim Lysenko).
However, many of its elements have been and are subverted by the vile, those without ethics, and in turn it tends to corrupt scientists and physicians into unethical behavior. It has almost always been “Frankenstein science.”
Thankfully, because of its inherent complexity, successes in Eugenics have been generally limited to observational and lucky guesses; though efforts to ethnically cleanse “undesirables” using Eugenics as justification were done with little scientific understanding, and most likely would have been done anyway.
Eugenics as a genetic science may eventually provide a few, limited benefits, such as correcting defective genes resulting in terrible genetic illnesses, but that will be as more genetic science than Eugenics, per se.
The great lust for “Deux ex machina” (God from a machine), will continue to thrill those who wish to abuse it; but much like reanimating dead tissue to re-create man from clay, making Dr. Frankenstein a “Modern Prometheus”; their efforts to make a “Master Race”, eliminate “defectives and criminals”, ethnically cleanse hated minorities, and make their children “like unto gods”, is not going to happen.
This is not to say either that efforts will not be made, resulting in endless human suffering and death in the name of Eugenics; nor that this suffering and death would *not* have occurred if it didn’t have Eugenics as an excuse.
And every now and then, there will be a lucky guess and limited success. It will be enough to keep Eugenics going, at least among the vile, those without ethics.
They will never discover a homosexual gene because it DOES NOT EXIST. If it did, it would be a recessive gene and would have been extinguished due to non-reproduction thousands of years ago.
The left talks about a “gay gene” as a way to legitimize sodomy.
The movement was later lead by Charles Darwin's son Leonard. Three of its most well-known advocates were Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Hitler and Margaret Sanger.
It lost a lot of popularity after the horrors of the Holocaust were exposed. However, it has come back in full force with Roe v. Wade, the euthanasia movement and now embryonic stem cell research.
Good that they’re bringing this up. A de facto eugenics movement seems to be gaining momentum recently.
Eugenics took a brief hiatus from April, 1945 to January, 1973 — it has been gaining strength ever since.
It's every bit as strong as the link between fish and bicycles.
Funny, I always thought social Darwinists (eugenicists) understood Margaret Sanger’s objectives.
A very good reason to not under-define Eugenics. It has always been controlled, not for science, but for philosophy and politics. In turn, this has expanded it far beyond its scientific origins into a pillar of secular humanism.
People have long selectively bred animals, the thinking goes, so why not apply that, and other science, into creating a “better” human? The great problem lies in what the best definition of “better” is.
Sterilization of undesirables has only recently been discovered to have been in widespread use for decades in most of the western nations. And France had a recent scandal of its top medical people intentionally distributing HIV tainted blood products to hemophiliacs, with the idea of eliminating the disease entirely from France—by killing all the hemophiliacs.
Certainly the decline of medical ethics can be seen in both abortion and euthanasia. But it is just as insidious in research and development.
Disregarding their duty to patients is a hideous shame on the US medical community.
Allowing hundreds of thousands of black children to suffer pellagra, while giving white children inexpensive brewer’s yeast supplements to prevent it.
Allowing large numbers of black men to suffer from untreated syphilis, for no particular reason, as the untreated disease progression was well known.
Intentionally giving toxic radiological substances to people to determine the effects of radiation poisoning.
Forced sterilization courts. Involuntary testing of new drugs on emergency room patients right now.
While it is not all derived from the idea of Eugenics, Eugenics is so intertwined with it that it must take the blame as well.
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