For Sake of Science They Abused These Girls
“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” –Albert Einstein
Secularists today love to frame the religion vs. science debate as one of “superstitions” against fact as if theistic truth, morality and the spiritual aspect of humanity is meaningless fluff not to intersect with the hard fact and incontestability of science. But, as I quoted Einstein, the patron saint of scienceists, there is a part of science that dangerously crosses over into religion’s realm of morality even as secularists try to deny that fact. And here is a story that does, indeed, show scientists crossing over into the realm of evil to satisfy scientific curiosity. It is an evil not as bad as that of a Doctor Mengele to be sure, but one that rises to a level of evil that few would expect in today’s modern age.
Imagine taking twin baby girls and purposefully splitting them up merely as an experiment to observe their lives as they grew up keeping them from knowing of the existence of each other? Would you find justified this dispassionate decision, this coldly scientific decision, to take away a lifetime of sisterhood just to satisfy a scientific curiosity? Apparently Doctor Peter Neubauer, an internationally renowned child psychiatrist, found no struggle with his conscience over such a scientific experiment because that is exactly what he did to identical twins, Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein, when they were infants. In 1968 Doctor Neubauer used the twin girls for a bizarre and immoral social experiment splitting them away from each other in order to observe how they would progress. They grew up neither knowing that they had an identical twin sister out there.
Nature versus nurture has been a nagging question for scientists for generations. Are we the result of our genes or of our environment goes the raging debate. Apparently, Doctor Neubauer decided to use the lives of these two girls to satisfy his curiosity over the ages old question. And evidently he knew what he was doing would be considered wrong because he ordered that the results of his study be locked in a Yale archive, not to be opened until 2066, long after all concerned should be deceased.
He didn’t have the spine to own up to the consequences of his actions, obviously.
After 35 year apart, however, the girls found each other at long last. Of this inhuman experiment one of the girls, Elyse Schein, recently said, “Nature intended for us to be raised together, so I think it was a crime we were separated.” Of what had occurred to them, her sister Paula said, “It was like something out of a movie, I broke down in tears.”
We all know that the evil scientist who uses his intellectual gifts for evil instead of good is the trope of umpteen B grade horror and sci-fi movies but it isn’t just fiction that has worried over the evil science can do. Einstein often worried over such evil as I relayed in the quote that started this piece. It is said that J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the first Atomic bomb, quoted the Hindi Bhagavad Gita upon seeing the power of the weapon he created: “I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” Over the decades, many scientists and inventors have found anguish rewarding them for their scientific experiments that led to weapons inventions, as well. Many say that Alfred Nobel’s Peace Prize was his penance for having invented the destructive power of dynamite. The widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle went mad and spent her enormous inheritance on séances and building and re-building her mansion in odd and unnecessary ways. It turns out that many highly intelligent, even brilliant, scientists have struggled with the fact that science can be used for evil just as easily as it can be used for good.
In the actions of Doctor Neubauer we have a man who gave away his humanity for the sake of a scientific experiment. And, while this particular experiment does not rise to the depths of depravity of Doctor Mengele, famed as the man who performed inhuman experiments in the name of science on live Nazi concentration camp victims, it shows the same sort of unconcern over the ideas of morality and care for their victims. It shows the same lack of human compassion and love that should guide the hand of science.
It shows an utter lack of morality.
But, in the end, that is the road down which science must lead us if it is treated as an end in and of itself. As a creed, as a moral guide, science is insufficient. Science cannot be a moral force for good because it has no provision for considering man “special” enough to safeguard his life, it has no aspect that can make man’s existence sacrosanct. Science, as a singular goal, lacks any kind of morality that religion tries to promote. Science is, in fact, amoral. It is not necessarily anti-human, of course, but it has no special care for humanity at all — neither good nor bad.
And that is just the problem. For, without a soul, science can be used as a justification for the actions of as many Mengeles and Neubauers as it can for Saulks and Madame Curies. Since it has no morality it can be used to justify any use of it despite how dismissive of human life or integrity it can be.
Naturally, religion has been perverted and used to justify any manner of torture and destruction quite unmindful of humanity. This we know. But, at its core, religion always held some group or another as sacrosanct and that is evidence of at least a basic moral code. Religion does not view humanity dispassionately to the point where his very existence is a meaningless cog in an experiment. Some moral system is intrinsic to religion no matter how uneven its observance.
Not so for science. And this is the very thing that Einstein feared when he uttered the quote that began this piece. The uncaring, inhumanity of science must be tempered with the soul of religion before man is reduced to nothing but a pointless collection of chemicals that needs no “rights” and whose existence is placed at the mercy of an ideology that makes of him a mere plaything.
This is a debate we desperately need in an era when science is on the verge of creating the destruction of humanity in new and undreamt of ways. But, we’d best not wait too long to have it, lest it become too late. It is certainly a discussion that neither the evil Doctor Mengle nor Doctor Peter Neubauer ever considered important enough to entertain. And humanity has been diminished as a result.
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Stumble It!
November 8th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
This is a major point that advocates of atheism miss — and it’s the same issue MND columnist Denyse O’Leary made in her article, “A Tongan asks, What would atheism offer that is better than Christianity?”
In the absence of a Universal Moral Purpose, scientists can justify the dehumanization of any “subject” — even a human one.
November 8th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Interesting commentary. Though the situation is very sad, and there are things like the IRB to help prevent such, its made even worse by the fact that it was not necessary to visit this situation as the capriciousness of life would do that. back then, it was not as common to attempt to preserve twin bonds, so it was not uncommon for twins to be placed in different homes (even today it happens).
Its just an interesting choice, because ultimately this doctor is a nothing, his reach is small, his crime a trajedy, only because it takes more ot make a statistic.
what about dr money? he condemned those with ambiguous genetalia to be raised automatically arbitrarily female. his crowning glory was a twin in which a dr accidentally used the wrong setting on a cauterizer to circumcize the child. they then basically tried to convince the child that he was a she and that she had a medical condition that would require hormone treatments.
money crowned this glory as a success totally ignoring the evidence in front of him. his work and such has left a lasting scar as it was used by feminist theorists to ‘prove’ that sexual orientation and such was totally nature not nuture helping to confirm the concept of tabula rasa.
here is moneys obit from the times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11money.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/C/Carey,%20Benedict
Early in his career, Dr. Money coined the terms “gender identity,” to describe the internal experience of sexuality, and “gender role,” to refer to social expectations of male and female behavior. The two concepts still drive much research into sexual identity.
In 1973, Dr. Money reported that the child, who had been castrated and furnished with dresses and dolls, was doing well, and had accepted the new identity as a girl.
But in a 1997 report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a pair of researchers provided a detailed follow-up: the boy had repudiated his female identity at age 14 and had even had surgery to reconstruct his genitals.
In 2004, the man who had reclaimed his sex committed suicide. His family blamed the effort to change his sex.
here is slate on the man… (real name David Riemer)
http://www.slate.com/id/2101678/
but wait.. there is more…
how about Kinsey? ever read his work on the child as a sexual being?
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (p. 180) he mentions orgasms of a five month old.
Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences the Red Queen and the Grand Scheme
http://www.amazon.com/Kinsey-Crimes-Consequences-Queen-Scheme/dp/0966662407
however anyone can read kinsey himself and one only needs to figure out how did he get his results to know what he did.
Kinsey’s Kids
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/crouse200311140923.asp
The most-egregious aspect of Kinsey’s methodology was his use of children as subjects. He used over 300 children, including babies, in his studies of female orgasm. Some critics legitimately accuse Kinsey of child molestation. The American Board of Pediatrics argues that his data are not the norm; that he used unnatural stimulation and, even then, did not prove his point. Using pedophiles, he charted the length and frequency of infants’ and children’s supposed “orgasms.” When questioned about how he knew whether a baby had an orgasm, he said he measured by their crying. Five of these infants and children were subjects for months or years, and it is reported that much of the “testing” occurred when they were either strapped or held down. There is no evidence that the institute followed up to see whether they were adversely affected as a result of this sexual abuse/experimentation. We do know that today many of the adult “subjects” refuse to discuss Kinsey’s research; some 50 years later, they don’t even want to talk about the horrific experience.
both these doctors though have a direct connection to the hypocracy and ideology connected to men, and both have done far more harm… and i think are better examples… one can search online and see how they are still quoted..
but you can also check out the new knowlege that margret meades work was sham too… (franz boas turned out to be a spy thanks to venona transcripts).
depending on who you read…you get a different answer… however the best research going over the notes and with interviews in a recent book cover that she knew and was complicit… those that cant get around the falseness try to pass it off as a culture misunderstanding and was all a practical joke that everyone knew was a joke but margret… though her relationship with boas who was fronting, tends to make one lean to her servicing an agenda.
Derek Freeman, in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, is the detailed book.. but you can find lefitsts and useful idiots all over making apologetics and reasonableness and forgiveness only for such convincing. however the one thing they all do, is not deny that her work was a sham.
by the way… she was mostly discredited by her own notes… not just the comments of a few native girls and such.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:epF1zm2-hCsJ:ambrosevideo.com/resources/docs/262.PDF+%22margaret+meade%22+%22betty+friedan%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us
will show you that they still have the same influence and that the lying was and is ignored. i doubt given all the other content in that teachers guide, that they are going to tell the truth about meade, and others she worked with. .
and who can forget Inevitability of Patriarchy, by Margaret Meade
given what we know now, how do we regard the influence that now has its own momentum even though there is nothing holding it up except those keeping the work of these people going to serve ideological purposes.
bet if i looked.. i could find other examples… though most of the most egregious ones, whose results rippled far away from just their patients to shape policy, and such, are in the modern past 100 years. (with so many now doing bad science, its polluting the field and lowering its effectiveness to provide real answers and solutions for the public).
November 8th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Doctors have been at the forefront of every fascist movement in history.