A Look Into The Archive:
German medicine ‘is still haunted by Nazis’
(sz) Germany’s reluctance to confront its Nazi past is holding back advances in human reproduction, it was claimed yesterday [28th/June/2004].
The shadow of the eugenics experiments of the 1930s and 1940s, in which hundreds of thousands were killed and many forcibly sterilised, has led to the strictest embryo research laws in Europe.
Dr Rolf Winau, professor of the history of medicine at the Charité medical faculty in Berlin, says too many doctors are unwilling to be “disturbed” by the dark times of German medicine.
“We have to study the history of medicine in the Nazi era so we understand the roots and mechanisms of an inhuman medicine and why over 45 per cent of all German physicians were Nazis and why some of them worked as researchers in concentration camps,” he said.
“We need to study the ‘Rassenhygiene’, the German version of eugenics, to show how far eugenic and racial thinking can go so that we can have it in mind when we discuss ethical questions on reproduction and fertility.
“If we do not, we face uncertainty, lack of information and confusion when considering ethical questions.”
Germany has some of the strictest laws on human reproduction in Europe and many techniques allowed elsewhere are banned.
These include pre-implantation genetic diagnosis which can detect genetic disease in an embryo before it is transferred to a woman, and the use of surplus embryos from IVF treatment for research. more…
From: »The Daily Telegraph«