Abstract
Dear Editor,
This letter was accepted as an important commentary on presentation ethics, but as a point of clarification the conference being discussed was not a Wilderness Medical Society event. — Editor-in-Chief
To the Editor,
Last year, I attended a virtual conference on wilderness medicine. The topics were carefully chosen and the speakers were well prepared. Although I missed the pre-pandemic routine of sitting next to and chatting with like-minded colleagues from around the globe in the conventional conference venue, I very much enjoyed having the content zoomed in to the privacy, comfort, and safety of my home.
All of that suddenly ended when one of the speakers, lecturing on hypothermia and describing the case of an accidental cold water immersion patient, displayed a chart from a publication circa 1945 depicting the duration of human immersion in cold water and its effect on mortality. Circles on the chart represented the number of Dachau prisoners who lived and died after they were immersed in cold water. To be clear, these were concentration camp inmates who were involuntarily and brutally tortured in order to find out how long they could live in cold water. Many died. Of the survivors, many suffered additional torture as Nazi scientists subjected them to rewarming techniques.
There was no warning that this would be forthcoming or included in the presentation, and upon seeing this slide, I became temporarily incapacitated. Although the study was described as “highly unethical,” the speaker then went on to report the findings, concluding that cold water immersion can cause death quite rapidly. The slide remained on the screen for 34 seconds.
How did an otherwise highly engaging lecture on hypothermia devolve so rapidly and unexpectedly? Why did the speaker choose to insert immorally acquired “findings” into a wilderness medicine conference? Was this the best evidence available in order to meet an educational objective? I waited for weeks and months to see if the content would be challenged and/or censored by conference organizers or withheld from the online recordings. At time of this writing, as far as I am aware, none of this has occurred.
Dissemination of Nazi research at scientific meetings has happened before, and although this was the first time I witnessed use of materials in a virtual broadcast forum, others have had similar experiences. 1 Why should we care?
The arguments for and against the use of “information” or “data” gathered from unethical research have been discussed elsewhere. 2 -4 The speaker at the conference I attended was not using the information collected by Nazi scientists to study hypothermia for the betterment of humanity nor to introduce a topic and discussion at the intersection of wilderness medicine and bioethics; rather, the speaker seemed to be presenting the findings as part of a scientific review of the subject. This seems like an odd choice. A review 5 of the experimental design and analysis of the reported results demonstrates that the Dachau hypothermia experiments are “scientifically useless.” 6
Regardless of scientific merit, I do not know why anyone would select to use data obtained through unethical research in an educational presentation. Perhaps the speaker believed that the material did have educational value. Perhaps the speaker was not aware of the controversy that exists in citing Nazi research as a means of understanding and tackling contemporary issues in wilderness medicine. Ignorance may have played a role in the decision to do so; however, ignorance can be dangerous too.
Hypothermia is an especially important topic to the wilderness medicine community and rightfully deserves its place in a conference agenda and curriculum. As a wilderness medical society, we must ask ourselves, is it permissible to inject the findings and conclusions derived from unethical research into our educational offerings and scholarly work? If the answer is no, then we must speak up against the use of this information to prevent it from becoming embedded in medicine and science. Wilderness medicine societies, fellowship programs, and other training institutions should consider implementing curricula and policies to address and educate about these and other bioethical issues that exist within our specialty.