Science has undoubtedly benefited humanity. We can thank scientists for humans being able to live longer, feed billions of people (once thought to be impossible), and just let our curiosity run wild. We are so privileged to live in a time where we have access to so much knowledge across so many disciplines that those before us have created and refined through the scientific method. Unfortunately, however, humanity also tends to do horrible things, often for financial gain and power. War is so often used to justify atrocities that are otherwise understood as evil and science gives opportunities to harm. When such powerful tools get into the hands of the wrong people the consequences can be fatal for many. This article will explore a few times, during WWII, when this tendency has culminated in devastation - either because of our knowledge or to further our understanding of science.
World War II immediately springs to mind as an example of science being a force for evil. Between 1939 and 1945, weapons were created to cause as much death and destruction as possible in new and creative ways, utilising new technology to achieve this. Nuclear physics, pioneered by Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, and others, became a bleak example of this application of science during the second world war. The result was a weapon that ushered in a new age of science entirely, unleashing 15 kilotons of energy instantly and obliterating two entire cities in Japan.
Photograph depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, 1945 (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/atomic-bomb-hiroshima).
The Hiroshima bomb killed 70,000 people almost instantly and exposed even more to lethal doses of radiation estimated to have killed at least another 70,000 in the city - while causing birth defects and spikes in cancer that continued decades later. Fast forward to the present, there is uncertainty about whether this attack was even necessary to force a Japanese surrender. It remains a divisive issue where those in Japan overwhelmingly agree that it was unnecessary, while those in the US believe the attacks were necessary. In 2003, during a scathing speech about US imperialism, Nelson Mandela condemned the bombing as a cynical attempt by the Truman administration to show off its newly developed weapons to the Soviet Union as the Cold War began intensifying.
Nuclear weapons highlighted a horrific outcome of increasing scientific knowledge during WWII. However, the dehumanisation and abuses inherent to war also enabled science to show another, uglier side. Scientific research on humans was commonly carried out during the war, particularly by the Nazis and Japanese forces. Eduard Wirths was appointed the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz between 1942 and 1945, seizing the opportunity to use those imprisoned as test subjects. He was in charge of 20 other scientists, including arguably the most famous Nazi physician: Josef Mengele. Mengele was responsible for deciding who went to gas chambers vs. those sent to do forced labour instead. He would often select people to carry out depraved experiments on, seemingly just because he could.
His experiments were essentially just torturing to an extreme degree, where he would inject diseases into people to monitor their effects, perform blood transfusions between twins, castrate young boys, and amputate limbs to treat them. He was particularly drawn to twins and would treat them favourably, while introducing himself as “Uncle Mengele”. He would often hand out sweets and treat them well before carrying out his sadistic experiments.
Mengele experimented on approximately 3,000 individual twins at Auschwitz and, like the Japanese war crimes carried out by scientists on Chinese and Russian prisoners of war, justified the research to himself in two main ways 1.) being in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and 2.) for the benefit of soldiers during the war. War times enabled researchers to circumvent legal barriers to such unethical experiments, allowing them to unleash their twisted vision of what science is. While this was argued by those carrying out the war crimes, the data collected was overwhelmingly worthless.
Rooted in eugenic theories, many of the hypotheses being tested were already understood to be anti-science, so they were flawed from the moment they were conceived. The data collection methods were also inadequate, plus much of the data was destroyed and therefore incomplete. Nazis, knowing they were on the brink of defeat, wanted to destroy any evidence of their involvement in such atrocities to protect themselves during the resulting tribunals. Some key Nazis, including Mengele, were able to escape their trial and live the rest of their lives abroad under secret identities. The American government let many Nazi scientists and Japanese war criminals get away with their crimes in exchange for data and expertise.
Some research into hyperthermia, carried out by Nazi researchers on human subjects at the Dachau Concentration Camp, actually did turn out to be scientifically valuable. A fierce debate ensued around the accuracy of this research, however, by 1984 more than 45 scientific papers referenced these Dachau experiments. It is widely accepted that the methodology was incomplete and disorganised, however many still believe that the findings could help save lives.
Interestingly, as tensions between the US and Soviet Union escalated before and after WWII, huge amounts of public funds went into science. Despite this research having malicious intentions, valuable data were obtained, especially in the sciences of oceanography and environmental science. Technological advances with their origins in Cold War research are responsible for immensely developing our scientific knowledge. (I plan to write up on this in more detail in a future post).
The debate surrounding these issues is still prescient today as we face so many ethical questions about military technology, which continues to evolve, plus more recent scientific advances that may raise ethical concerns e.g. genetic engineering and Ai. The ability of people to excuse evil if it serves a perceived greater purpose has been a constant throughout history and the recent war in Ukraine is yet another clear example. Human rights abuses persist and show no signs of being a thing of the past. While science is neither intrinsically good nor bad, humanity can be both. It's up to us to elect politicians more responsibly and ensure that these problems are better addressed.
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