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Anatomy of Horror

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Google Desktop Search: Requested NewsBank Article save German pilots who had been ejected from their planes and had fallen in freezing oceanwaters, and to treat frost-bitten soldiers at the Russian war front. The results were also used bythe British during the war, and are now of interest to researchers studying hypothermia. But forthose who work with the victims of human rights abuses, the medical knowledge cannot beseparated from the horror of the experiments. !``I don't think we should use the research findings of heinous crimesor atrocities even if it would do good,'' said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation's oldest human rights organizations. ``It wouldretrospectively cleanse the atrocity and possibly justify similar acts in the future. ``If societydelivered a very clear message to medical science that the ends do not justify the means -regardless what you find, it can and will not be used - it will discourage unethical research,'' hesaid. ``You should say, `It matters not that it will save lives, because it took lives.' '' The Universityof Vienna, under pressure from some researchers, recently agreed to try to identify the corpsesthat Pernkopf used for his atlas. The 800-odd watercolor paintings were drawn between 1933 and1957, and were collected into two volumes in 1963 in the version generally used today. DavidWilliams, director of medical illustration at Purdue University, and a scholar on the history of thebook, said it was unlikely th!at the drawings made in the Nazi years used Jewish models. In fact, he said, the corpses usedmay have been those of Austrian political prisoners, not Jews. Ironically, some may have beenanti-Semites. But whatever their identities or ideologies, the models in the book are uniquelyhuman. ``These painters had a special ability to impart a color scheme that literally brought themto life,'' Williams said. ``It's like you're looking at a living person who has been dissected.'' Today,modern photography and technology have made other - less expensive - anatomical atlasesavailable, but the Pernkopf book is still widely used by surgeons and medical illustrators as aclassic of detail and aesthetics. About 200 copies of a German edition of the atlas are sold eachyear, according to Edward Hutton, the chief executive of Waverly, the atlas' publishing house. Nonew English editions are planned. What have scientists done when confronted with such ethicaldilemmas? Arthur Caplan, a !senior bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said useful knowledge from such projects or studies - including Tuskegee - has usually been used ``unflinchingly.''Pragmatism has ruled. The devil in the current dilemma is that not using the ``tainted knowledge''may be equally unethical. ``If I have to operate tomorrow on somebody,'' oral surgeon Israelasked, ``and studying that book makes me a better doctor, is it unethical not to use it?'' He used tostudy the Pernkopf atlas before performing surgery because, he said, the vivid drawings werealmost like ``doing the surgery twice.'' He now primarily uses other atlases - but concedes helooks at Pernkopf in complex cases, where he knows he cannot find a comparable illustration. Theinterests of the patient demand it, Israel said. ``Are we adding insult to injury by not using thedata?'' asked Jay Katz, professor emeritus of law, medicine and psychiatry at Yale Law School.``It would be nice if we lived in a world where morality would turn people away from usingunethically obtained data!. But we live in an un-ideal world. People want to avail themselves of benefits that might help theirloved ones, no matter how that data was obtained.'' The Tuskegee experiment, for whichPresident Clinton recently apologized to the victims on behalf of the U.S. government, is a goodexample of this. ``What we know about syphilis,'' bioethicist Caplan has written, ``is so stronglyrooted in the findings of the Tuskegee study that, short of throwing out all books on venereal andinfectious diseases, there is no way to avoid citing, referencing, and talking about the study.''Penelope Hitchcock, the National Institutes of Health's top researcher into sexually transmitteddiseases, also argues for use of the data. Tuskegee's results, she says, might yet point the way toa vaccine for syphilis, which afflicted 68,000 Americans in 1995. Katz, Caplan and others say thatdata from such research should be used, but that it should be tagged as tainted. Citations of thearticles in ! http://127.0.0.1:4664/cache?event_id=77464&schema_...&q=Anatomy+of+Horror&s=9DcwIBG54gSpZEUksxcSxaAL9Rs (2 of 3)5/10/2006 7:17:54 AM

Google Desktop Search: Requested NewsBank Article scientific journals should delete the names of the researchers - so asnot to give them credit. Hutton, the Pernkopf atlas' publisher, who spoke at the conference inBaltimore, said he would publish the findings of the University of Vienna's inquiry into the identityof the models in later editions of the book. He said he already prints a foreword in the currentGerman edition detailing Pernkopf's Nazi background. ``It's up to every user of this atlas as to howto confront it,'' he said, referring to the lack of consensus at the conference. ``We are giving fulldisclosure and attention to this issue, but we don't feel that science and the ethical issue is servedby pulling the book off the market.'' Such arguments, said the Anti-Defamation League's Foxman,were tantamount to saying society valued the results of unethical experiments more than itabhorred the crime of conducting them. ``That's another way of euphemizing and rationalizing andlegitimizing what was done,'' he said. ``It's another way to say it was OK.''