CW: abuse
There have always been people who did science in ways that were unethical. The Nazis did appalling experiments. Tuskegee was an appalling study. Appalling nutritional experiments were done on hungry Indigenous children in residential schools in Canada.
There have always been people who did science in ways that were unethical. The Nazis did appalling experiments. Tuskegee was an appalling study. Appalling nutritional experiments were done on hungry Indigenous children in residential schools in Canada.
The knowledge gained from those experiments has never, ever been worth the costs incurred by the people harmed. We do not honour the experimenters. We do not give them prizes. This is a principled position.
This same principle holds when, rather than harming people in their experiments, scientists harm people on their team or people in their fields.
By harming people in the course of doing science, they damage the scientific enterprise. The harm they cause to science means they aren’t good scientists. This is not complicated. It’s called having principles and standards.
