Bioethics and anti-bioethics in light
of Nazi medicine: what must we remember?
by
Wikler D, Barondess J.
University of Wisconsin.
Kennedy Inst Ethics J. 1993 Mar;3(1):39-55

ABSTRACT

Only recently have historians explored in depth the role of the medical profession in Nazi Germany. Several recent works reveal that physicians joined the Nazi party in disproportionate numbers and lent both their efforts and their authority to Nazi eugenic and racist programs. While the crimes of the physician Mengele and a few others are well known, recent research points to a much broader involvement by the profession, even in its everyday clinical work. Analogous activities existed in the German legal and industrial communities; disruption of the medical ethic thus sprang from the broader social contexts of Nazi Germany. The new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, now opening on the Mall in Washington, D.C., will have an opportunity to educate the public about both the great crimes at Auschwitz and other camps, and the gradual but thorough degradation of ethics in the German medical profession. From this presentation, contemporary bioethics can ponder the proper use of the Nazi analogy in bioethical debate.

Private eugenics
Personal genomics
Psychiatric genetics
Germline epimutation
Human self-domestication
Computational epigenetics
Selecting potential children
Brain size/human evolution
Psychiatry in the Third Reich
Human dignity in the Nazi era
Scientific racism in Nazi Germany
Transhumanism/Brave New World?
Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance
The origin of the principle of informed consent
Developmental and environmental variation in genomes
Maternal inheritance, epigenetics and the evolution of polyandry

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