Letters to the Editor: There’s no excuse for using medical research done by Nazi doctors

To the editor: UCLA medical professor Dr. Kalyanam Shivkumar’s work to replace the widely used anatomical atlas by Nazi physician Eduard Pernkopf is commendable, and others in the medical field should aggressively follow his lead. There must be numerous examples of ethically bankrupt medical research resulting in seemingly indispensable contemporary reference documents.

As a high school science teacher, I had an ethics lesson that asked students to examine the moral conundrum of the contemporary use of hypothermia research done by Nazi scientists on non-consenting Allied airmen, in violation of medical ethics and the Geneva Conventions. My objective was to get them thinking about questions of whether good could come from evil.

In this case, I could let my students off the hook because the so-called researchers were sadists and their scientific rigor was poor, rendering their results unscientific.

Today we have tremendously sophisticated diagnostic and computational tools to examine the human body, and abundant ways to obtain new and better medical knowledge. Ethically compromised resources should be ferreted out and replaced, wherever they occur.

David Seidel, Beverly Hills

..

To the editor: My father, a Jewish general surgeon, was totally enamored of his Pernkopf anatomy texts, which he felt were far better than those by Dr. Frank Netter or even Gray’s Anatomy. When I became a surgeon, he gave them to me.

I have known about their origins for 10 years and have struggled over whether or not to burn them. I decided to keep them not only to honor my father, but also to “never forget.”

Judith Braslow Zacher, M.D. Palm Desert