X-Message-Number: 7726
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: Mike and Brian Wowk's messages
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 22:55:55 -0800 (PST)

Hi!

Re: Brian Wowk's announcement

The vitrification results announced are truly very interesting. One issue
is left out: at what temperature should vitrified patients be kept for
long term storage? Does this method still work if we take them down to
LN temperature or does it require a higher temperature?

And, of course, since we've just come from a situation where the experiments
failed, how much experimental work has been done on this system? Experiments
or not, it does look like a good idea.

Re: Mike Darwin's comments

It seems to me that WE have no moral problems at all in using results gotten
from NAZI experiments. We didn't do those experiments, and they did show us
important things about the world. I would say the same about Peenemunde.

When I was in high school and took Latin, we read Caesar's GALLIC WARS (in
the original Latin). Caesar proceeded through what is now France, busily
committing what we would now consider to be atrocious war crimes. All you
have to do is read history --- in fact even only 100 years ago, to see
that lots of people even in the US were doing atrocious things to the
American Indians, again matters which would be now considered war crimes.
If anything, Nazi ideology was a survival of ideas far more common in 
Europe and elsewhere in the 19th Century, and universal in the 18th Century.

And if you really want to think about it, your farthest (back in time)
ancestors all did the same, busily killing one another off and eating 
one another to boot. Of course, you're here because your ancestors were
among those eating rather than those eaten.

I will notice that all of this woe and terror is now in the past, we all
(if only in the sense that this history created the world we live in now)
benefited from it, and not one of us actually participated. It seems to me
that we have two basic choices: we can decide to feel guilty for all of
these past crimes because we've benefited from them (if you really want to
do that you can paralyze yourself with guilt) or simply forget them and
do what we can to see that WE don't do any such thing NOW AND IN THE FUTURE.

If we're to be consistent, it isn't just the Nazis. A generation before
them it was everyone, and just by reading the papers you can see people
still doing such things, and likely to get away with it. We can set higher
standards for ourselves now, and hopefully even reach them. And doing THAT
rather than passing judgement on others, now dead, is what ethics and
morality really should be about.

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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