
ME AND MENGELE
by Dianne N. Irving
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. Read more...
The article ends with:"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?""
ReplyDelete-- I happen to be reading "Letter from a Christian Citizen" by Douglas Wilson which is an answer written in response to the book "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris an atheist. Wilson had reported that Harris had praised the Jains for having a higher ethic and avoiding even the killing of insects but then belittles Christians saying things like "This explains why Christians like yourself expend more 'moral' energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide." What Wilson points out then is the irony of claiming high ground for the Jain who oppose killing even insect and then criticizing Christians for opposing the killing of tiny infants. The two statements taken together show a capacity for self-serving moral blindness that is breathtaking both figuratively and literally. The killing of the unborn is every bit a holocaust. The fact that it is often focused on the third world makes it a conscious genocide as well. We live in a world poised on the point of moral collapse.