Re: HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS

[Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 10:37 22.11.1996 -0600, you wrote:
>> experiments were not unique evil. But I believe that any - really any -
>> medical experiments, which are secret and without the consent of the patient
>> are evil.
>
>---How about drafting men into the army and sending them into situations
>where there is a good chance for them to be killed or badly wounded, all
>without any informed consent. In the medical experiments, there was no
>harm being done to the patients.
>
>============================================================

Bernard,

I cannot see any contradiction between what I said and what you said. There
is a difference between ethical considerations and laws. (I hope you agree.)
I agree that obviously no harm was done to the patients. 

I clearly said that I assume that at the time of the experiments US
legislation did not allow experiments without consent of the patient. If I
am wrong, please confirm. If it was not allowed, then it was illegal. If it
was allowed then it was legal at that time. Whether it was ethically ok is
another question. But one should be very careful: Any of the Nazi crimes and
the Stalin crimes and any other crimes which were "legal" at their time are
of good reasons not judged as being exempted from the laws of today.

I personally do not think that drafting men for war where they might be
killed or wounded badly is ethically acceptable. But I am sure you would
agree that this is legally backed......... 

I want you to know, that I always admired your way of showing other people
that their opinions cannot be correct, by simply proving that their
assumptions lead to results which contradict obviously to reality. I have
used this approach extensively. Some people stated in the course of the
nuclear power debate, that a mass of plutonium of the size of an orange,
distributed over the world would kill the entire population of the world. I
told them, how many nuclear bombs have been detonated in the atmosphere,
what the critical mass might be, that about 90 % of the plutonium will be
spread without fission and that the amount of plutonium will be higher by
several orders of magnitude than the mass of the orange. The I asked them,
if we still lived.....

I had the pleasure to attend your presentation about radon some time ago in
Vienna. Unfortunatly this Mr. Tschurlovits, whom nobody takes for serious in
Austria interrupted our discussion about the application of short term
measurements using charcoal and liquid scintillation. I can tell you that we
have used this method extensively in the Austrian Radon Project and the
discrepancies between short term LSC and track etch are about the same size
as the discrepancies betwen track etch and electret. So in my opinion the
charcoal-LSC method has its merits!

Best regards,

Franz
Schoenhofer
Habichergasse 31/7
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