Caplan: Beware Holocaust analogies
While it is common for analogies to be made between topics such as abortion or euthanasia and the Holocaust, the vast majority of such analogies are baseless, Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at Penn, explained in a talk at the Lewis-Thomas Laboratory on Tuesday.During his lecture, titled ?Bioethics & the Holocaust,? Caplan said that medical experimentation during World War II is often ignored in discussions of bioethics, though the field originated largely in response to Nazi doctors? atrocities during the war.Caplan said that many bioethics articles, however, reference the Nuremberg Code, rules governing medical research on humans developed specifically to prevent future instances of the barbaric experiments carried out on concentration camp prisoners.One reason the bioethics community often ignores the topic of the Holocaust is that it is hard to accept that doctors were so intimately associated with it, with some bioethicists suggesting that only ?fringe elements? were involved, Caplan said.On the contrary, ?collaboration between the medical community and the Nazi party was so intimate that if you took away all Nazi doctors, you would have virtually no doctors left,? Caplan said.