- Fleur_@aussie.zoneEnglish2 hours
“trust us guys we didn’t learn anything from the most evil and horrid experiments of all time.”
- 1 day
The saga of Unit 731 and how they received zero punitive action is just one of the several horridly fucked-up things that came out of the end of the Second World War, and how both the Western Allies and the Soviets cleaned up afterwards.
- plyth@feddit.orgEnglish1 day
The Soviet Union and the United States gathered data and evidence from the Unit after the fall of Japan. While twelve Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, they were sentenced only to the Siberian labor camp from 2 to 25 years, seemingly in exchange for the information they held.[1] Those captured by the US military were secretly given immunity,[2] while being covered up with stipends to the perpetrators. The US was purported to have co-opted the researchers’ bioweapons information and experience for use in their own warfare program (resembling Operation Paperclip), and so did the Soviet Union in building their bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from the Unit in Manchuria.[1][3][4] In 1956, those still serving their sentences were released and repatriated to Japan.
- marxismtomorrow@lemmy.todayEnglish1 day
That’s a weird way to phrase it given some of the data is still used today, for example with the frostbite information specifically.
But yes the US is made up of all the nazis and evil people they claimed to want to fight. Because they didn’t really want to fight them, it was just the most profitable thing to do at the time.
1 dayThat data is not used anymore and you can’t cite it or cite any paper that cite them.
- PhobosAnomaly@feddit.ukEnglish1 day
Out of sheer interest, is it because the data was discredited or is there an ethics issue that kills a paper once it’s been cited?
- MartianSands@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 day
My understanding is there was little to no actual science in that data.
To be science, the data would need to be systematic and care would need to be taken to exclude confounding factors. What that unit did doesn’t become science simply because they made notes.
The US govt took the data, did they ever release any of it? I have read they claim it’s “of little use”, and if true should be fine to release after all this time
We just don’t have much use for data about how frostbite affects people who’ve already been tortured first.
- ushmel@piefed.worldEnglish23 hours
Imagine honoring an agreement with these people. Literally no one would have cared if you just tossed them into the Pacific
- Ikon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 hour
Show their kids the “reaseach” they did. They probably won’t mind after.
- velma@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish1 day
Lemme tell you about how we got the right scientists to be able to put a person on the moon.
- Mirshe@lemmy.worldEnglish8 hours
Actually, a lot of the scientists themselves spoke on it, and people who had first-hand accounts of what they went through. Even a few former members have spoken on what they did. We know the data is effectively worthless for much the same reason as we know Mengele’s data was worthless - the subjects are all sorts of ages and backgrounds and most had been tortured or at least starving in a concentration camp. Data on, say, frostbite affecting HEALTHY people might be worth something, but there are so many confounding factors between disease, starvation, injuries, etc that it’s almost impossible to disentangle the testing data from what was already there.
Additionally, a lot of the data is very obvious shit anyone could’ve told you already, and the experiments (especially with 731) done to make things that looked like science, or experiments that were done to replicate Western science so Japan could internally take credit. It doesn’t take a surgeon to tell you “hey if you put people in a vacuum chamber, they die” or “hey if you vivisect someone and take their lungs out, they need those and they’ll die.”
