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[martinuzz]

Those pesky Germans have been up to gassing people again.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/gezonde-proefpersonen-urenlang-blootgesteld-aan-uitlaatgassen-in-opdracht-van-duitse-autofabrikanten~a4563268/
BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen have paid researchers to expose a group of 25 young, healthy test subjects to various concentrations of various nitrous oxides (NOx) for many hours, to investigate the health effects of those. Joseph Mengele would have been proud.

NOx's are mainly produced by diesel engines. According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, there were no measurable health effects in the test subjects.
https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.kommentar-zu-den-abgasexperimenten-der-autolobby-groteske-versuche.eead64ae-cbd2-4f04-8d67-d53ba9b61815.html

This is the next PR disaster fo the German automotive industry, which already suffered a lot after their tampering with their cars' software to make them look cleaner in lab tests.
The uncovering of the human testing follows a press realease by the NYT, which exposed Volkswagen to have been testing exhaust fumes on primates in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/world/europe/volkswagen-diesel-emissions-monkeys.html

I guess we'll have to firebomb Dresden again to teach them not to gas people /sarcasm

[Loud Whispers]

Did somebody call for freedom bombs?

[ChairmanPoo]

The uncovering of the human testing follows a press realease by the NYT, which exposed Volkswagen to have been testing exhaust fumes on primates in the US.

Well, technically they tested them on primates in Germany as well....

BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen have paid researchers to expose a group of 25 young, healthy test subjects to various concentrations of various nitrous oxides (NOx) for many hours, to investigate the health effects of those. Joseph Mengele would have been proud.

Mengele wouldn´t have paid them, though.

[Baffler]

It's not exactly Mengele tier, because while it may seem somewhat unethical to some it actually is useful information. Important even, considering how frequently people are exposed to it and how paradoxically badly understood it all is. It even makes sense that they'd sponsor such research, even if only to keep from having to pay infinity dollars in lawsuits, fines, and indemnities somewhere down the line. The only thing that's really a problem here in my mind is that they (seem to have? the translation of those articles came out strange in some places) manipulated the results.

[martinuzz]

Mengele's experiments provided medical society with useful and important information too :p

But yeah, ofcourse this is nowhere near as unethical.

[Cyroth]

NOx's are mainly produced by diesel engines. According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, there were no measurable health effects in the test subjects.
https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.kommentar-zu-den-abgasexperimenten-der-autolobby-groteske-versuche.eead64ae-cbd2-4f04-8d67-d53ba9b61815.html

I am very confused as to what that test was supposed to accomplish.
The two NOx produced by diesel engines are nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. Both are toxic gases that the human body is somewhat* resistant to and that have no cumulative effects on long term exposure, at least as long as you don't cross that threshold where your body can just shrug them off (after that threshold "long term exposure" is the least of your concerns anyways). Especially when compared to other things found in engine exhausts, those two are essentially harmless.
Don't misunderstand me, they'll still kill you pretty horribly on higher concentrations, but the ammounts that come out of even an unclean engine would be surviveable pretty much infinitely for any human in reasonably good health.

Specifically testing for those two in engine exhaust is like taking a very long list of dangerous stuff, testing the two least dangerous ones and then saying that the entire list is save because those two didn't kill you.
(And I guess that answers my own question)

Manipulating the results just makes this even more senseless then it was to beginn with.

[Baffler]

Mengele's experiments provided medical society with useful and important information too :p

It's a tangent but no, they really didn't. Very little of scientific value came out of the Nazi camps at all in fact. The pressure chamber experiments everyone talks about were too poorly standardized and recorded to be useful to anybody, and even if they hadn't been so poorly controlled they weren't going to discover anything that wasn't already well understood. The almost as frequently mentioned studies on frostbite are similarly useless. Mengele's own studies on dwarfism and on twins were intended to prove Nazi racial theory and were essentially just thinly-veiled torture. Here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/06/mein_data.html

Leaving aside the question of medical ethics, did any useful science ever come out of Nazi experiments on unwilling subjects?

Very little. Concentration camp doctors conducted research on vaccines, antibiotics, fertility, transplantation, and eugenics. The majority of those experiments were either useless, scientifically unsound, or duplicative. More interesting was a series of studies on the limits of human endurance: At the Dachau concentration camp in 1942, Nazi doctor Sigmund Rascher submerged approximately 300 naked victims in ice water for two to five hours and monitored their heart rate, muscle control, and core temperature, and he noted when the subjects lost consciousness. (His stated goal was to see how long a downed pilot could survive in the North Sea.) More than 80 of the prisoners died during the experiments; nevertheless, some argue that Rascher's data are valuable and irreproducible. Dozens of medical journal articles have cited the research, which has played a minor role in the development of survival suits for cold-water fishing boats and warming techniques for hypothermia patients.

Rascher's findings do not establish an absolute human tolerance for cold, since his victims were emaciated and suffering from weeks or months of inhumane treatment. But the results do supplement and extend modern experiments, in which subjects aren't permitted to go below 95 degrees. (The guinea pigs at Dachau were left in the ice water until their body temperatures dropped to 80 degrees or less.) From this we glean that cooling rates at very low temperatures are generally consistent with those in moderate conditions.

None of the other concentration camp experiments proved useful in any way. Many of the results were predictable, like the fact that imprisoned Gypsies could not survive on salt water alone for 12 days. Other projects, like Josef Mengele's attempts to increase the multiple birth rate among Aryans, were utter failures, while research on mass sterilization would be of no use to modern doctors if it ever did produce substantive data. The few concentration camp tests that pursued worthwhile ends, like testing the safety of novel antibiotics, were being duplicated elsewhere under humane conditions and with more reliable results. (For their antibiotic tests, the Nazis would inflict a wound on a prisoner, induce gangrene by cutting off circulation to the injury and exposing it to bacteria, and then attempt to treat the infection.)

(The concentration camp research was just one aspect of an otherwise very successful Nazi science program. WWII-era German doctors established the link between asbestos and lung cancer, and German scientists developed the electron microscope.)

After hearing the evidence against the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg trials, the judges adopted 10 guidelines to prevent future unethical research. Informed consent, the first of the recommendations, remains the keystone of medical studies. But the scientific community still hasn't reached a consensus on how to treat valid scientific data that was obtained unethically. Most journals do not maintain blanket prohibitions on citations of Nazi data, but researchers have seen their articles rejected for referencing Rascher's studies.

The article notes Rascher's research as being used elsewhere, but even it has serious problems.

NOx's are mainly produced by diesel engines. According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, there were no measurable health effects in the test subjects.
https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.kommentar-zu-den-abgasexperimenten-der-autolobby-groteske-versuche.eead64ae-cbd2-4f04-8d67-d53ba9b61815.html

I am very confused as to what that test was supposed to accomplish.
The two NOx produced by diesel engines are nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. Both are toxic gases that the human body is somewhat* resistant to and that have no cumulative effects on long term exposure, at least as long as you don't cross that threshold where your body can just shrug them off (after that threshold "long term exposure" is the least of your concerns anyways). Especially when compared to other things found in engine exhausts, those two are essentially harmless.
Don't misunderstand me, they'll still kill you pretty horribly on higher concentrations, but the ammounts that come out of even an unclean engine would be surviveable pretty much infinitely for any human in reasonably good health.

Specifically testing for those two in engine exhaust is like taking a very long list of dangerous stuff, testing the two least dangerous ones and then saying that the entire list is save because those two didn't kill you.
(And I guess that answers my own question)

My guess is that the goal is to look for subtler things than respiratory irritation. Essentially harmless doesn't necessarily mean harmless.

[martinuzz]

Mengele's experiments provided medical society with useful and important information too :p

It's a tangent but no, they really didn't. Very little of scientific value came out of the Nazi camps at all in fact. The pressure chamber experiments everyone talks about were too poorly standardized and recorded to be useful to anybody, and even if they hadn't been so poorly controlled they weren't going to discover anything that wasn't already well understood. The almost as frequently mentioned studies on frostbite are similarly useless. Mengele's own studies on dwarfism and on twins were intended to prove Nazi racial theory and were essentially just thinly-veiled torture. Here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/06/mein_data.html

Leaving aside the question of medical ethics, did any useful science ever come out of Nazi experiments on unwilling subjects?

Very little. Concentration camp doctors conducted research on vaccines, antibiotics, fertility, transplantation, and eugenics. The majority of those experiments were either useless, scientifically unsound, or duplicative. More interesting was a series of studies on the limits of human endurance: At the Dachau concentration camp in 1942, Nazi doctor Sigmund Rascher submerged approximately 300 naked victims in ice water for two to five hours and monitored their heart rate, muscle control, and core temperature, and he noted when the subjects lost consciousness. (His stated goal was to see how long a downed pilot could survive in the North Sea.) More than 80 of the prisoners died during the experiments; nevertheless, some argue that Rascher's data are valuable and irreproducible. Dozens of medical journal articles have cited the research, which has played a minor role in the development of survival suits for cold-water fishing boats and warming techniques for hypothermia patients.

Rascher's findings do not establish an absolute human tolerance for cold, since his victims were emaciated and suffering from weeks or months of inhumane treatment. But the results do supplement and extend modern experiments, in which subjects aren't permitted to go below 95 degrees. (The guinea pigs at Dachau were left in the ice water until their body temperatures dropped to 80 degrees or less.) From this we glean that cooling rates at very low temperatures are generally consistent with those in moderate conditions.

None of the other concentration camp experiments proved useful in any way. Many of the results were predictable, like the fact that imprisoned Gypsies could not survive on salt water alone for 12 days. Other projects, like Josef Mengele's attempts to increase the multiple birth rate among Aryans, were utter failures, while research on mass sterilization would be of no use to modern doctors if it ever did produce substantive data. The few concentration camp tests that pursued worthwhile ends, like testing the safety of novel antibiotics, were being duplicated elsewhere under humane conditions and with more reliable results. (For their antibiotic tests, the Nazis would inflict a wound on a prisoner, induce gangrene by cutting off circulation to the injury and exposing it to bacteria, and then attempt to treat the infection.)

(The concentration camp research was just one aspect of an otherwise very successful Nazi science program. WWII-era German doctors established the link between asbestos and lung cancer, and German scientists developed the electron microscope.)

After hearing the evidence against the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg trials, the judges adopted 10 guidelines to prevent future unethical research. Informed consent, the first of the recommendations, remains the keystone of medical studies. But the scientific community still hasn't reached a consensus on how to treat valid scientific data that was obtained unethically. Most journals do not maintain blanket prohibitions on citations of Nazi data, but researchers have seen their articles rejected for referencing Rascher's studies.

I guess I was wrong then. I thought some of Mengele's experiments on exsanguination and blood transfusion were at the base of ER protocols, but to be honest, I can't find anything on the subject.

[TD1]

I read an academic article somewhere claiming that Nazi scientists post-war used knowledge gained through ... dubious ... means to build fairly useful medical knowledge.

[Antioch]

I've never actually read what that "useful data" would actually be. I also highly wonder if such data couldn't have been acquired by other means such as animal testing.

[Loud Whispers]

I read an academic article somewhere claiming that Nazi scientists post-war used knowledge gained through ... dubious ... means to build fairly useful medical knowledge.

Some stuff about vaccines, but the real profiteers were the Americans, who gave Unit-731 experimenters legal immunity in exchange for their data. Where the Nazi experimenters were imprisoned or executed, the Unit-731 dudes ended up becoming Health Ministers, heads of Medical Boards and Medical Universities, and the data they collected was certainly useful. Though you wouldn't call it research, it was not research. It was experimentation; putting people through hell to see what humans can survive. You can't even excuse it as ruthless experimentation, as a lot of the suffering caused was entirely unnecessary and counterproductive. Unit-731 went beyond by also being at the forefront of biological weapons research and application. Which of course, went hand in hand with their medical experiments; easy to test cures if you can make patients.

An anonymous medical assistant described in a 1995 New York Times interview his first vivisection:
“The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down.
But when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming.
I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.
This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

The way they found effective treatments can only be seen as deliberately as malicious as possible. The frostbite one for example - there are immediately better ways to research effective frostbite treatments without tying prisoners naked to posts outdoors in Siberian winter. It's like setting people on fire to learn how to treat burns.

Experiments covered every conceivable approach to spreading disease, and to prevention. A typical laboratory experiment with cholera was conducted in May and June of 1940. Twenty prisoners, all between the ages of twenty and thirty and in good health, were selected for the test. Eight persons were given cholera vaccine injections produced with ultrasonic equipment. Eight others were injected with cholera vaccine manufactured by a conventional method. Four of the experimented were not inoculated. Twenty days later, all the victims were forced to drink copious amounts of cholera-infected milk. The four who received no immunization contracted cholera and died. Several of those tested who received conventional cholera injections also became ill and died. The eight who were vaccinated with ult,rasonic cholera vaccine showed no cholera symptoms. A similar test with plague vaccines produced comparable results. Ishii then ordered his Vaccine Squad, renamed the "A Team" in 1940, to work only with ultrasonically produced vaccines.
Ishii, Kitano, and the other Unit 731 researchers did not trumpet their activities throughout the scientific world, but neither did they shrink from publicly sharing some of their findings. They just disguised the human experimentation aspect. Researchers published or read more than one hundred scientific papers, both during the heyday of Unit 731's operation as well as in the postwar period. When dealing with humans, the researchers referred to experiments with "moneys" or "Manchurian monkeys"; animal experiments were labeled with the animals' proper subspecies, such as "long-tailed monkey," "Taiwan monkey," or "Formosan monkey."'

For the bioweapons people, developing cures were a necessary component towards developing effective bioweapons. A bioweapon that will eradicate your enemies is useless if you lack the cure to stop it eradicating your own, and if deployed will require countermeasures against retaliatory bioweapon deployment. Thus the need for these kinds of medical advances were military affairs of paramount importance to the warring states, certain in the conviction that this would be a war of exterminate or be exterminated. It produced this monstrosity, and produced the impetus with which the US gave Unit-731 protection in exchange for their advances in medicine and bioweapons research

[redwallzyl]

Is this the NAZI/731 horrifying medical experiment thread now?

[smjjames]

If she were a 'remainer', wouldn't she just spike the proverbial brexit ball and cancel brexit?

[TD1]

She's in a high pressure job. She's also not as 'strong and stable' as she'd like you to think, but at least some of that arises from the difficulty of her position.

If she were a 'remainer', wouldn't she just spike the proverbial brexit ball and cancel brexit?

And no. There's this pesky thing called democracy...

I've no doubt she has Remain tendencies, but she's also too far down this path to hop off it now.

[martinuzz]

In september 2016, Insiya(3y) was kidnapped using much violence from the home of her grandmother, in Amsterdam.
Even though one of the kidnappers, who later turned out to be a professional US hired thug, was tackled and held to the ground by an alert neighbor, the other kidnappers got away with the child, and an Amber Alert did not bring her back.

Some time later, her father, Shehzad Hemani, a very wealthy businessman from India, reported the child was in his care in Mumbai.
The child's mother hasn't seen or heard from her child since.

Dutch crime reporter John van de Heuvel took an interest in the case, and in the past year has discovered that she is being kept in her Indian grandmother's house in a rich district of Mumbai, and is sent to an expensive private school protected by heavily armed guards.

Even though the child's mother has won every civil case in the Netherlands, and Hemani is a wanted criminal here for ordering the armed kidnapping, up until now, Indian authorities showed little willingness to cooperate, let alone extradite the extremely wealthy businessman.
Our ministry of foreign affairs mediated the case with Indian authorities, and even our prime minister Rutte even personally discussed the matter with the Indian president Modi, until now, to no avail.
India is one of the countries that did not sign the international child kidnapping treaty.

But now, an Indian court has ruled that the child needs to be returned to her mother in the Netherlands, before the 27th of march, including a clause that does not allow for further legal proceedings to delay the date.
The mother's lawyer is cautiously optimistic.

It is unclear how Hemani will respond to the verdict, and if he is going to cooperate with returning the child.
For now, his only response is a Facebook post with his daughter, with the text 'Love live happiness with my daughter'.
Meanwhile in Amsterdam, the mother is put in police protective custody.
In the past, a legal defeat of Hemani has led to voodoo dolls being delivered at her doorstep.
The father is rich enough to hire an entire army of mercenaries.

Let's hope he doesn't kill the kid now to 'preserve family honour'