William RevilleKnowledge should only be pursued by ethical means
Everybody has heard about the inhuman and criminal medical experiments carried out on defenceless concentration camp inmates by Nazi medical physicians, such as Dr Josef Mengele, during World War II. But far fewer people have heard about similar experiments carried out by Japanese physicians on helpless prisoners, although these experiments are officially well documented.
After the war, the Nazi physicians responsible for the German atrocities were tried and sentenced by the Allies. On the other hand, America actively concealed information about the Japanese medical experiments and granted immunity from prosecution to the perpetrators. These events are recounted and analysed by Howard Brody and others in the journal Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Vol. 23, pp 220-230, (2014).
Researchers have identified about 25,000 victims of unethical Nazi medical experiments. About 5% of these experiments ended in death, but many others caused severe mutilation of the subjects.
The best-known centre for Japanese medical experimentation was called Unit 731, established in 1936 near Harbin in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and commanded by Shiro Ishii. Many thousands of prisoners were experimented on and killed in Unit 731 and in other branches.
The main experiments carried out in Unit 731 were concerned with biological questions, involving the deliberate infection of prisoners, mainly Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, with infectious agents. No prisoners survived these experiments because those who didn’t die from infection were killed and studied by autopsy.
Other experiments tested human response to freezing and other extreme conditions. In the latter days of the war all remaining prisoners were killed to conceal evidence.
Efficiency
In the field, Japanese troops tested the efficiency of disease-spreading weapons against enemy troops and civilian populations. Thousands of deaths resulted from spreading plague infested fleas and cholera bacteria in China in this manner.
The Nazis justified their medical experiments, largely carried out on Jews, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, on three grounds: racist beliefs, public health, and wartime national interests.
The Nazis believed that people of German-Aryan stock where superior to all other races and greatly feared that unbridled reproduction amongst ‘unfit’ races would contaminate the German people with ‘inferior’ genes. Nazis believed that if the cream of German youth were facing death on the battlefield then it was only fair that racially ‘inferior’ stock should also be sacrificed for the war effort.
The authors describe how the Japanese were motivated by two of these justifications. Although they were not concerned about threats to Japanese racial purity, they did view the Chinese and Koreans as racially inferior, and they just wanted to get rid of ‘inferior’ populations and occupy their territories for imperial reasons.
They also frequently appealed to patriotism.
Justice
The Allies scientifically investigated the conduct of Nazi doctors in Germany during WW2, unearthing much evidence of unethical behaviour and war crimes.
In December 1946, an American Military Tribunal opened proceedings against 23 leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity – including planning and executing a euthanasia programme on victims such as the mentally ill and physically impaired, and conducting experiments on thousands of concentration camp inmates without their consent.
Sixteen of the doctors were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death and were executed on June 2, 1948.
In complete contrast to the German experience, little was done to publicly expose and bring the Japanese counterparts of the Nazi doctors to justice. In particular, the large-scale atrocities perpetrated at Unit 731 and other centers were not hauled onto the stage of public scrutiny. Instead they were actively covered up.
It is shocking to learn that this cover-up was carried out by the Americans largely at the behest of the scientists who had investigated the activities of Unit 731. These scientists from the US Army had been investigating biological warfare at Camp Dietrich, Maryland, but made slow progress because of ethical scruples.
They were envious of the results obtained by the Japanese. The upshot of all of this was that the scientists persuaded the Americans to strike a deal with Shiro Ishii and his subordinates to trade immunity from prosecution in return for access to the results that had been obtained from the awful Japanese experiments.
As a result, the Army task force concluded that “the value to the US of Japanese (biological warfare) data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes prosecution”.
Moral blindness
Many of Unit 731’s doctors subsequently enjoyed successful careers in Japan after the war. Shiro Ishii lived out his days in peaceful obscurity. Kitano Misaji succeeded Ishii as head of Unit 731 late in the war and later headed a leading Japanese pharmaceutical firm.
The Americans did hold one trial in 1948 arising out of an incident in 1945. Eight American airmen parachuted out of a B29 bomber over Japan. They were captured and handed over to the medical doctors at Kyushu University, who carried out grisly vivisection experiments on them (without anesthetics). All the airmen died. Twenty-three doctors were found guilty at trial. Two were sentenced to death and the others to prison. The sentences were later commuted and all were freed by 1958.
How can this moral blindness on behalf of the Americans in failing to bring these Japanese doctors to justice be explained? The principal explanation proposed by the authors is ‘wartime exigency’. The Cold War began immediately after WW2 ended and the Americans didn’t want the Russians to get their hands on the results of the grisly Japanese experiments, which would happen if a trial with detailed evidence were prosecuted.
Also the Korean War (1950-53) was brewing, Japan was an American ally after WW2 and the USA was loath to antagonise her ally. Then there was the intrinsic value of the information in the Japanese data.
The authors note, “wartime exigency does more than simply prioritise national security over human rights, it urges toughness and decisiveness in decision-making, such that a moral blindness that would be seen as a deficiency in other times is instead seen as a virtue and a necessity”.
The notion of wartime exigency may go some way towards explaining what happened, but, of course, it goes little or no way towards excusing what happened. I concede that it would be unreasonable to expect that the full nuance of civilised behaviour would survive wartime conditions unscathed. But this exception goes nowhere near excusing turning a blind eye to barbarous behavior.
I am particularly disappointed to learn that it was the scientific side that persuaded the legal side not to take the Japanese doctors to trial. Scientists have a huge thirst to discover new knowledge but must always remain aware that such knowledge should only be pursued by ethical means. Because something can be done does not necessarily mean that it should be done.
No good will come through bad means. Indeed, in this particular case it is ironic to note that, when Japanese data was finally and fully analysed, it added little or nothing to what the Americans knew already from their own work.
William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC. http://understandingscience.ucc.iew