[Pflienews] PharmFacts E-News Update: Me and Mengele; Steele disappoints on life, sodomy issues; Bubba flunks Bio 101....

Fri Mar 13 17:20:18 MDT 2009

*PharmFacts E-News Update -- 13 Mar 2009 AD

*

http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irv/irv_136meandmengele.html

  Me And Mengele

Dianne N. Irving, MA, PhD 
October 18, 2003
Reproduced with Permission

As a biochemistry major at the end of my Junior year, I had already had 
some of my research published earlier, so my department head suggested 
that I could do something "different" for my senior thesis if I wanted - 
like medical ethics (bioethics didn't exist yet!). I thought about it, 
and remembered being touched by a small book we had read in a Junior 
year Chemistry Conference Course - courses each student was required to 
take in their major for their last two years in order to integrate their 
own special fields or "concentrations" with the other areas of 
knowledge. Junior year's course usually took the students through their 
academic field's long historical development, and in chemistry we had 
read a small book by J. Bronowski, a philosopher/scientist/journalist 
who wrote during and after World War II, especially about the Nazi 
medical experiments used to achieve eugenics which soon became the focus 
of the Nuremberg Trials.

Bronowski recalls the time when the bombs had just been dropped on 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He found himself on a small ferry filled with 
military personnel who were assigned to observe, study and report the 
immediate consequences of these bombings as the ferry drifted closely 
along the Japanese shoreline. He tries to describe the devastation but 
has profound difficulty finding words that could describe the horrific 
scene drifting surreally before them. He recalls the strange, piercing, 
and awkward silence on the ferry stuffed with so many "observers" - all 
but one sound. From the metal megaphones fixed in the ceilings of the 
ferry drifted the haunting music of one of the popular tunes of the day, 
and he was struck by how it captured so perfectly what he was finding so 
difficult to articulate. The name of the song was, "Is you is, or is you 
ain't my baby?", and as a philosopher of science it had haunted him ever 
since. The devastation that lay before them had a signature.

And his words had made me stop and ponder about any moral obligations 
and moral accountability I might have as a brand new research scientist 
myself. What exactly had taken place in those Nazi medical experiments 
with human subjects? How could such brilliant scientists and physicians 
have conceived and carried out such abominable crimes against humanity 
in the name of "science" and "the greater good"? "Well, they were going 
to die anyway; might as well get some good out of them"! And given that 
the first moral obligation of a researcher is that the science being 
performed on human subjects is as accurate as possible, and performed 
only by those academically credentialed and qualified [Nuremberg Code], 
just how did the Nazi human medical experiments measure up to even that 
initial but critical international moral standard? I would do my senior 
thesis on the Nazi medical war crimes - even though the war seemed so 
long ago (!) (This was 1963).

It was difficult for me to narrow my topic for my thesis, and my 
department head kept forcing me to get more and more selective. For a 
year and a half I haunted the halls of the Library of Congress, my desk 
constantly piled high with books, manuscripts, films, etc. Indeed, they 
were still finding such documents and items almost on a weekly basis, 
and often the clerk would simply bring me a wicker basket stuffed with 
the latest items. For months at a time I even watched the hundreds of 
raw film footage of the Nazi concentration camps that was pouring into 
the Archives - although I always had to stop at times, because I simply 
couldn't take it any more. At such times I would just shut down my desk, 
grab my coat, and get out of there - arriving back at school with one 
huge Excedrin headache.

One of those items they brought me in a wicker basket one day was the 
actual lab book that belonged to Dr. Mengele, along with piles of random 
photographs taken in his lab of his "patients" during his experiments. 
[[For some odd reason it is claimed today that no such lab book exists; 
but it did, as I held it in my hands several times]]. One set of twin 
experiments attracted my attention - those performed on about three-year 
old blonde hair, blue eyed Eastern European Gypsy twins. One twin would 
be held as the "control" of the experiment; the other twin was subjected 
to serial experiments, designed to mimic wounds of Nazi soldiers in the 
battle fields.

The twins were kept in cages right in Mengele's laboratory, just off his 
office. The cages measured 1  by 1  by 1  meters. During the mornings 
Mengele would come into the lab to visit with his "girls"; such times he 
was always dressed impeccably in his suit. He would take the girls out 
of their cages and bounce them on his knees, asking them to call him 
"Papa". But in the afternoons he would come back to the lab wearing his 
starched white lab coat, and the girls knew then that it was time for 
more experimenting. He would take one of the twins into a small narrow 
closet-like space, where he would take a knife and remove more and more 
of her femur bone in one leg - and then observe. No anesthetic, no pain 
killers, no antibiotics, no ice, no bandages, no nothing - thus 
resembling the conditions of the battle field. After he finished cutting 
the twin's leg bone, he would simply carry her over to a "stretcher" and 
let her remain there until she was ready to be placed back into her cage 
with her sister. The photos of the tiny suffering little girl in that 
dense and dark "recovery" room, so butchered, and bloody and pathetic, 
would be etched into my memory for a long long time - a memory that I 
would carry with me into the rest of my work to come.

After finally graduating, I worked at the bench at NIH (NCI), doing 
research in radiation biology and in viral oncology, and eventually 
given a career appointment as a research biochemist/biologist. But I 
left NIH after 7 years to study the brand new field of "bioethics" -- 
mostly because of the many ethical issues I "experienced" at NIH as a 
bench researcher, especially seeing the patients there to whom our 
research was being applied - sometimes ethically, sometimes not so 
ethically. So I became a member of the First Generationers - the first 
graduate class to go through the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at 
Georgetown University. This was 1979, one year after the publication of 
The Belmont Report of the National Commission - fulfilling their 
Congressional mandate to "identify the ethical principles that the 
United States government should use in dealing with issues concerning 
the use of human subjects in experimental and therapeutic research" 
(National Research Act 1974)! This was the formal "birth of bioethics", 
and the "new ethics" would be grounded in the new Belmont bioethics 
principles of autonomy, justice and beneficence (all quite oddly 
defined). We First Generationers had no clue.

I won't go into how utterly un-Catholic, much less unscholarly, we all 
found this new "bioethics" to be; long, brutal, ugly battles, dirty 
tricks, and deceptions. All of us graduate students knew that there was 
something VERY wrong with that "bioethics" picture. But I finally got to 
the point where I was required to submit my proposal for my doctoral 
dissertation to the Graduate Dean. At first I was going to do it on the 
use of human subjects in research; too broad. Since the real uncharted 
territory was the use of "Group Two's" in research - i.e., human 
subjects who were particularly vulnerable and thus needed stricter legal 
and ethical governmental protections - I finally narrowed it down to the 
MOST vulnerable research subjects, i.e., the use of living human fetuses 
in experimental research (an on-going scandal in the research community 
at the time). I ordered and studied all of the current international 
guidelines on fetal research; too broad. How could I get this topic 
narrow enough for the Graduate Dean?

Perhaps I should do it on human embryo research -- a 
then-uncontroversial issue that was just beginning to get noticed in 
Australia. I started compiling the bioethics literature on human embryo 
research that had already started moving into our U.S. bioethics 
literature. Still worried that this too was too broad a topic, I 
immersed myself into these articles to identify an even narrower issue. 
It was about three o'clock in the morning; I was blurry-eyed, when I 
finally came to the journal writer's conclusion after a very long, 
contorted and flimsy argument as to why "surplus" IVF human embryos 
could be "ethically" used in destructive experimental research - for 
"the advancement of science" and for "the greater good". His final 
statement nearly made me leap out of the couch - "Well, they are going 
to die anyway, so we might as well get some good out of them"! Good God! 
Where had I heard THAT before!? Years earlier. No, I just couldn't bear 
to go there again, too complicated; somebody else would have to do it. 
NOT ME! I slammed the journal closed and shot up to bed to get a few 
hours of sleep before I had to catch a plane the next day for Minnesota.

I had earlier received a call from bioethics guru Art Caplan. He was 
organizing the first-ever conference on Bioethics and the Holocaust, in 
Minnesota. He had remembered that I had told him one time about my 
earlier thesis on the Nazi medical war crimes and especially that I had 
bought films about the Holocaust from the National Archives - could he 
borrow them for the conference, etc.? If I could help him with this, he 
would be sure to get me into the by-invitation-only (and heavily 
guarded) conference. [[You can hear the various presentations at this 
conference, available from 
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/confAudio.html]].

So there I was in Minnesota, sitting in the audience after already three 
of five days of this amazingly tense conference. Oddly enough, the 
Holocaust -- like abortion -- was one issue that we bioethics students 
were not allowed to talk about in class, nor was it ever addressed in 
the rapidly bulging bioethics literature, so I was eager to attend this 
conference dedicated to such a "verboten" issue in bioethics. The fellow 
on my left turned out to be a German Lutheran pastor. While a young boy 
he remembered how his house's back yard backed up to the woods near 
Bergen Belsen, and he recounted to me so sadly how often they would see 
sick, tortured, bone-bare starved, often naked escaped prisoners 
wandering fearfully, desperately and aimlessly through those tangled 
woods. Sometimes the local people would sneak them food and water, but 
they too were terrified to be caught giving aid. Those memories of his 
boyhood were also etched into his memory as well - so much so that it 
was the major reason why he became a pastor, and why he had traveled all 
the way from Germany to attend this unique conference in Minnesota.

The very tense program had consisted of researchers, bioethicists, and 
Holocaust victims taking turns presenting their arguments as to why the 
data which resulted from those horrific experiments should or should not 
be used now to help others. Of course, the Holocaust victims who 
presented their arguments were in total agreement that such 
blood-tainted data should not be used. They were getting older and 
grayer now, sometimes barely able to hobble to and from the microphone, 
but powerfully persuasive speakers. One researcher, who for two days 
argued vehemently that the data should be used, walked up to the 
microphone again this day and began his same drill yet again. So we were 
totally astonished when, right in the middle of his paper, he stopped, 
became very silent, put his head down, shook with grief, took off his 
jacket, rolled up his sleeve, and laid bare the various tattoos from 
Dauchau on his arms! No, he recanted, he was so sorry, he just couldn't 
do it, he must change his argument and agree with the other Holocaust 
victims that such data should not be used!

As he pathetically apologized and slumped off of the stage, the next 
Holocaust victim slowly limped with great effort to the microphone to 
present her own arguments. I noticed at once that she was so young - how 
could she have been a Holocaust victim and yet be so young? She didn't 
even look Jewish. The blonde, blue-eyed victim began her speech. At the 
very young age of about 3, she and her sister had been used by Mengele 
in his infamous twin experiments. Her sister was the "control"; she was 
the "patient". Mengele kept them in cages right in his laboratory, just 
off his offices. The cages measured 1  by 1  by 1  meters. During the 
mornings Mengele would come into the lab to visit with his "girls"; such 
times he was always dressed impeccably in his suit. He would take the 
girls out of their cages and bounce them on his knees, asking them to 
call him "Papa". But in the afternoons he was come back to the lab 
wearing his lab coat, and the girls knew then that it was time for more 
experimenting!

I really thought I was hallucinating! I literally felt my body sinking 
right straight through the seat of my chair, even down through the hard 
wooden floor itself, and below. I grabbed the leg of the poor German 
pastor on my left to keep me from free-falling through to the basement - 
it was HER! This was the pathetic little girl I had done my biochemistry 
thesis on, whose photo of her tortured pain-wracked tiny body had been 
etched on my brain since those days long ago in the Library of Congress! 
It just couldn't possibly BE! But it was. I listened to her entire 
presentation, almost mouthing the words before she could even say them. 
The kind pastor understood; I had told him my story the afternoon he had 
told me his. "Go meet her", he insisted, "You must"! So trembling, and 
somehow deeply embarrassed and oddly mortified, I waited for her on the 
steps of the building as she came out. As soon as I (rather awkwardly) 
explained things to her she completely lost her composure, and the two 
of us just sank down onto the steps together and talked and cried for 
quite a while. My little Gypsy girl now has a name - Susan Seiler 
Vigorito. The final title of my doctoral dissertation at Georgetown was, 
A Philosophical and Scientific Analysis of the Nature of the Early Human 
Embryo (finally defended university-wide in 1991).

I realize now that the war has never really ended; nor has the quest for 
"eugenics". What could not be accomplished on the battle field is now 
being accomplished behind locked doors in laboratories around the world. 
And I ask myself on a daily basis now Bronowski's piercing question, "Is 
you is, or is you ain't my baby?"

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Steele disappoints pro-lifers, conservatives on abortion, homosexuality*
Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 3/13/2009 6:00:00 AMBookmark and Share 
<http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php>
Michael SteeleRepublican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is 
under fire from social conservatives for telling /GQ/ magazine that 
abortion is an "individual choice" and homosexuality is not.

Despite declaring to /GQ/ that women have the right to choose an 
abortion, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele 
has issued a statement saying he has always been pro-life and supports a 
constitutional amendment to overturn /Roe v. Wade/.

Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs for Liberty Counsel 
<http://www.lc.org/> and Liberty Alliance Action, says in Steele's 
interview with /GQ/, he "sounded like he was on the payroll of Planned 
Parenthood."

"I'm encouraged that Michael Steele is on record now in support of the 
human life amendment. However, for the life of me I cannot imagine why 
he would have chosen to use the euphemistic language of choice. That's 
language that they came up with in the smoky back room of Planned 
Parenthood somewhere to try to hide the reality of what abortion is," he 
contends. "There is no such thing as pro-choice. You're either 
pro-abortion or anti-abortion."

Barber admits he is also troubled that Steele told /GQ/ that believing 
homosexuality is a choice is equivalent to saying, "Tomorrow morning I'm 
going to stop being black."

"I am starting to wonder whether Michael Steele is on the payroll of the 
RNC or whether he's on the payroll of the [Democratic National 
Committee], because that sounds like Matt Barbersomething that Howard 
Dean or any spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign or the radical 
homosexual lobby would have said," he adds. "There's no science to 
support the notion that people are born homosexual."

Barber says it appears Steele and the Republican Party are going to 
continue making the same mistakes that landed them in the minority and 
are causing them to "spiral into the abyss of political irrelevancy

*Frank J. Nice, RPh, DPA, CPHP*
*Check out my new website and book, "Nonprescription Drugs for the 
Breastfeeding Mother" at: *
www.nicebreastfeeding.com <http://www.nicebreastfeeding.com/>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmh9p1rlkQk  --
Bubba Clinton and Dr Gupta do not know what an embryo is, flunk Biology 101*

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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