When our core body temperature begins to drop below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, we begin to shiver. Our movement becomes sluggish and labored while our coordination begins to fail. As our body temperature continues to drop, a sensation of warmth may overcome us as we edge closer to death.
The clinical term for this condition is hypothermia, a process we now adequately understand.
But our intricate knowledge of how the body responds to freezing temperatures is based off what many would call “tainted science.”
In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany began its invasion of Soviet Russia. As the invasion dragged into the winter, Nazi scientists began their quest to find new, effective ways of preventing and treating hypothermia experienced by their frontline soldiers.
Not satisfied with animal testing, these German scientists began what are now known as the “freezing experiments,” which involved dunking concentration camp inmates in vats of ice-cold water or forcing them to endure freezing temperatures in the nude.
These atrocious experiments, along with others, resulted in the death and disfigurement of thousands of innocents but created an immense amount of scientific data.
To this day, it is debated whether these data should be used. In some cases, as with the freezing experiments, the data have been widely deemed important enough to overshadow the method by which it was obtained.
Nevertheless, the vast documentation surrounding these experiments describes horrible, gut-wrenching accounts of inhumane activities — all in the name of science.
Disturbingly, the U.S. is not entitled to sit on a high horse and point a condemning finger at Germany.
We are just as guilty.
The U.S. has had a dark, albeit less publicized, history of nonconsensual human testing.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which involved the deliberate infection of rural black men with syphilis, is one of the most infamous experiments ever conducted in the U.S.
However, recent investigation into the U.S.’s history of medical experimentation by the Associated Press has yielded more unsettling finds.
Mentally unstable patients were infected with hepatitis in the 1940s, cancerous cell lines were injected into chronically ill patients in 1963, and animal testicles were implanted into prisoners around 1920.
All of these experiments produced some level of death and suffering.
The investigation has uncovered more than 40 horrific experiments all bearing a common theme. The men and women subjected to these inhumane trials were all disadvantaged — poor, mentally challenged, imprisoned or chronically ill.
While the U.S.’ attitude toward human testing began to sour between the 1960s and 1970s, the question undoubtedly remains — what are we to do with any resultant data?
For some of the experiments, the answer is easy, as certain experiments produced little to no useful information.
But when the data prove potentially beneficial to society, it’s difficult and possibly reckless to dismiss all scientific findings.
Most of these experiments were performed decades ago when bioethics was in its infancy, but as the scientific community has grown over the years, human experimentation can no longer be tolerated.
Therefore, it’s our responsibility to move forward without accepting or acknowledging data based on human testing if said testing is known to have taken place in a contemporary setting.
Although it may seem easy to regulate where our medical data come from in the U.S., it’s not unfathomable that nations with fledgling biomedical research programs, like China, may conduct experiments based in unacceptable methods.
To discourage the propagation of human testing in developing nations, these hypothetical data must be ignored, as well.
As informed as we are today, it would be irresponsible to deny the physical and psychological damage human testing causes, and fostering such denial may create more history we will regret.
Chris Freyder is a 21-year-old biological sciences junior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Cfreyder.
 
—————
Contact Chris Freyder at [email protected]