Countess Sonia, State Minister, Mister Mayor, organisers of the Kuratorium.
Students of medicine and biology whom I should possibly have mentioned first on the list, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here.
Ladies and gentlemen.
It is a great honour and a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak to you here at Lindau.
I want to talk about the ideals and values of science and medicine with a view to using these ideals and values
to help us to deal with various difficult problems today which are associated with the development of science and medicine.
For example the problems of science and war, which was a problem which concerned Alfred Nobel himself very, very much.
The problems of the environment which have come out of new technology.
And problems of medical ethics which have arisen out of new developments in biology and medicine.
And in that connection it’s good to see that tomorrow Professor Arber is introducing a discussion
on the scientific, social, ethical and legal aspects of genetic technology.
In order to get clearer the ideals and values of science and medicine,
I shall consider the scientist and the doctor in the role of a hero.
And I’ll take some examples of scientists and doctors, heroes at different times in history.
The idea of the hero, today it is more commonplace, someone who is successful, maybe a film star or a sportsman.
But the old idea of the hero from the ancient world of Greece, the classical world,
this archetypical hero underlies all our ideas today of what we feel is most valuable and important in our lives.
Of course today the whole world is obsessed with the idea of being successful.
But probably most of us will agree, or probably all of us here will agree, that success in obtaining money
and material possessions or in advancing our careers as careers, these are not really the most valuable things in life.
But if we scientists and doctors consider what we do in our work,
as distinct from merely being successful in our careers as career advancement,
do we not then feel there is something very special in that work?
And is there not something in the nature of that work which is like what the hero does?
Let us first mention some examples of the heroes of the ancient world.
There you had Hercules/Heracles, he had superhuman strength and he struggled through his enormous labours.
And eventually, after he died, he became an immortal god.
So a hero is a little bit like a god, a bit superhuman.
Then we have the example of Orpheus who loved his wife so much that when she died
he followed her into hell in the hope of bringing her back to life.
Well, he didn’t succeed in that but he himself became immortal.
Now Christ may also be regarded as a hero.
For love of humanity Christ struggled and suffered and by dying on the cross he achieved immortality.
And he offered immortal life to all people.
So this is the general idea of the hero, is that he faces and struggles with great challenges.
The greatest challenge of all of course is to overcome death by life.
And the hero myth symbolises man’s - and when I say man’s I also include women of course -
the struggle of men and women to transcend the limits of normal ways of living.
Go higher, to a higher form of living, make themselves better, improve themselves by attaining some higher state of being.
And the story of Christ may be regarded as a living myth which is active throughout history
and today in the Christians struggle to raise themselves up.
And in a similar way scientists have the myth of the scientist, who struggles to obtain scientific truth
and to overcome ignorance and superstition.
And the doctor of course struggles to restore health and save life.
And so the moral value of his work - and again or her work of course, lots of lady doctors -
this is quite obvious, because the doctor fosters life.
In the case of scientists the moral value of their work is not quite so obvious.
But if we feel that the scientist's truth is good and ignorance and superstition is bad,
then we could say that the scientist, like the doctor, fosters life.
Except that the scientist is concerned with the life of the mind, and the doctor is with the life of the body.
Now such an argument, though plausible, may not seem quite enough to establish
that there is an intrinsic value in scientific work itself.
Let us therefore consider the nature of the scientist’s truth for a minute, the nature of scientific knowledge.
Now the history of science shows clearly that the scientific knowledge of one era
is very largely replaced by the knowledge of the next era.
And therefore scientific truth is never final or absolute.
And I also agree with the current sociological analysis of science which claim that scientific thinking,
like all other kinds of thinking, is conditioned and modified by cultural and social influences.
On the other hand it is clear that the whole process of uncovering scientific truth over the centuries
has made enormous changes in how we understand the world and how we understand our own human nature.
And therefore, I think it is unavoidable that scientific truth is not just a matter of things changing and passing fashion.
But it has an aspect, there is an element in it which is permanent.
Or you might even say has a certain eternal quality to it.
One of the most basic characteristics of science is that it forms a unity, brings things together.
That it puts unity into knowledge which covers a wide range of general phenomena.
That science gives general knowledge, but it always aims at universal knowledge.
But of course it can never actually attain the universal.
And because of this unity that is really why science works.
That it predicts, it correlates, it’s useful.
Why it gives us power to explain things and power to control the natural world.
Now these examples of unity in science are many.
That physics has got lots of examples: the atomic theory of Democritus in ancient Greece;
Newton’s theory of universal gravitation; Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic waves.
And physics today has all kinds of new unified theories.
And in biology of course you have Darwin’s ideas which showed that human beings have a unity with all other living things.
And in molecular biology it shows there is unity at the molecular level.
And also that molecular biology unifies the physical and the biological sciences.
Now there’s also unity in the way that scientific knowledge itself comes into being and develops.
But every scientist knows that his or her new contribution to scientific knowledge,
that it depends on and derives from great many studies which have gone before by earlier scientists.
And one of the reasons scientists get satisfaction from their work, it means something to them, is that they know
that their own new results, the new knowledge which the scientist gets, may in its term be used by other scientists afterwards
to build up a larger and larger body of organised knowledge.
All the knowledge being organised and interconnected and unified.
And because of this, of course, scientists feel the need to share their knowledge,
bring it together at scientific meetings and so on.
And to a large extent that scientific knowledge only has meaning when it is shared.
And it’s interesting to note in this way scientific knowledge is quite different from property, wealth or power.
Because people don’t like sharing those things.
But scientific knowledge they like to share.
And thus there’s a strong force bringing scientists of all nations together
and all ideologies together into one great international scientific community.
At least that’s the way it is in theory, which is very good.
In practice of course things are not quite so good as that.
That the international community of science has got military, political pressures on it, so that it splits up.
And when there’s war the scientists of course are fighting each other, often like the other people in society.
But the ideal is there nonetheless.
Now in the middle ages the alchemists who studied chemical transformations,
and they were really interested in spiritual salvation rather than chemistry as such,
they believed that they couldn’t obtain the knowledge they needed unless they lived virtuous lives.
Now most scientists don’t really think of themselves as being very virtuous people.
But to some extent this is also true for scientists, because the ideal at least is that the scientist ought to be honest,
unprejudiced, open-minded, uninfluenced by self-interest.
Even they say a scientist ought to have humility.
I won’t talk more about that; it wouldn’t be a demonstration of humility if I started talking too much about scientists' humility.
Now in practice of course scientists don’t attain these ideals.
And if they fall too short of the ideal they won’t succeed in their work.
But there’s another point, is that the observations and ideas of all scientists should be examined disinterestedly.
That all scientists are in a sense equal.
That the youngest student who gets a new experimental result,
all the scientific community must look at that result as seriously as they ought to for a Nobel Prize winner.
In practice again of course it’s not like that.
But this at least is the way it ought to be.
That one student’s results may upset the whole, all the theories of the important scientists.
So in that respect science is basically a democratic process.
And so the unifying and democratising effects of science indicate there is moral value inherent in the scientific process itself.
Now the hero, the classical myths.
Through his great struggles, as I said, he transcends the nature as man.
And in the myth even overcomes mortality and death.
Now the ordinary scientist when he or she is working, even on a very modest scale, is struggling working towards an ideal
which we would say, I would say contains something very, very special.
This building up this vast body of scientific knowledge.
And so that even in the most modest work, scientific work, there is some element of what you might even say was sacred
or holy or eternal.
Thus following that reason we could recognise in every scientist, however modest, some trace of the ancient archetypical hero.
And also we could say that something of the scientist’s spirit lives on in his or her work.
And in that sense a scientist does attain immortality in that particular sense, like the great heroes of mythology.
It’s easier to see the doctor as hero, because he is the one who heals, and healing means making whole, making healthy.
And so the doctor helps to establish unity in the patients themselves
and in the relationships between the patient and the surroundings.
And apart from this healing the doctor also, like the scientist, is struggling and working to perfect his techniques, his art.
And to create knowledge and add to the eternal truth in the way that the scientist is to some extent.
The first example of a scientific hero I would like to mention.
It’s a little bit before, some people would say, real science.
That in ancient Greece we have Pythagoras, famous for his theorem in geometry.
I would say he was a real hero.
Because he wanted both to save people’s souls and also heal their bodies.
And to do this he enquired in a scientific way how best people ought to live.
And therefore he investigated the world in which we live.
And one discovery he made was that the strings of a musical instrument gave notes in harmony.
Harmonious relationship when the lengths of the strings on the instruments were in simple number ratio, like 2 to 1 or 3 to 1.
And he thought, Pythagoras said that these ratios gave harmony in all aspects of life.
For example he said that the planets moved with the music of the spheres.
And he saw music as the great healer - like music therapy which is sometimes used in medicine.
And that these harmonious relationships enabled people to live together in groups,
in communes where men and women worked together as equals.
Studying mathematics and medicine, astronomy.
And then looking forward beyond this life to eternal happiness in the afterlife.
And to me at least Pythagoras represents the ideal where science, medicine, art, religion, all came together.
In contrast to the present world where these are very much divided and separated one from the other.
The ideas of Pythagoras on harmony and number,
they probably helped the great teacher of medicine Hippocrates to develop his ideas.
Because Hippocrates saw much of disease as deriving from disharmony or from lack of balance
of what he called the 4 humours which filled the whole human body.
And his teaching emphasised the importance of close observation of the patient in a careful analysis of symptoms.
And in that way he laid the basis of scientific medicine.
And his influence is still very strong in medicine today,
also because in the Hippocratic Oath he stressed that doctors should preserve life and not destroy life.
And as a venerated teacher he was called the father of medicine.
Hippocrates has of course been a hero to students of medicine for thousands of years.
Well going on to the renaissance.
We have many heroes then.
For example we have Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo.
And after the renaissance that leads on to Isaac Newton.
And the main thing that they did in their work was to show that the heavenly bodies, the planets and the moon were not divine,
that the planets and the Moon were basically of the same nature as the Earth itself.
And so this together with Newton’s theory of universal gravitation
gave an extraordinary unity to the way people saw the whole universe.
You didn’t have the great separation between earth and heaven.
And Newton was seen as a great hero, national hero.
And when he died he was buried as a hero in Westminster Abbey in London.
And about the same, a little before, Francis Bacon had emphasised that much of the value of science
should derive from applying science, so that man could control the natural world and obtain material benefits.
So the emphasis was going more on the material side and less on the spiritual side.
Newton was a devout Christian and he regarded his scientific laws as the laws of God and part of God’s creation itself.
But after Laplace had developed Newton’s theory, the whole solar system was seen as a vast mechanism moving around,
which was quite automatic, which didn’t even need the merest touch of God’s finger just to keep it moving correctly.
And in that respect God really seemed no longer necessary.
And so as a result of these scientific developments people began to think about the possibility of living without God,
and science began to displace religion.
Then of course the geologists and biologists came along and they studied all the different forms of living things.
And they studied these in the fossils and in the rocks.
And they came up with the idea that living forms had gradually evolved after millions of years.
Which directly contradicted what the bible said about creation in terms of merely 6,000 years.
But Charles Darwin certainly was a great hero of science.
Because it was he who placed the idea of evolution on a firm basis with clear ideas of how it worked with natural selection.
And he travelled the whole length and breadth of the world collecting data on the forms of rocks and of living things.
And for almost 30 years he laboured like a hero, like Hercules, arranging all the detailed evidence for the natural selection.
And he had fairly continuous illnesses so he could only work 4 hours a day.
And he did all that.
And Darwin was very slow in publishing his results.
And actually Copernicus had been similar.
But when Wallace sent to Darwin similar ideas -
which is not quite the thing scientists do today when they have all these career pressures.
He sent this to Darwin.
Then Darwin said, ok I’ll publish my results and your results; we'll publish them together.
Which was a very nice sense of unity in the scientific community.
But of course Darwin’s work was a bombshell.
It’s really from the religious point of view, that whereas Newton had shown that heaven and earth were one,
Darwin now showed that man and animals were one.
And of course the idea that man had been created in the image of God according to the Christians,
now had evolved from animals, was a most unpleasant idea to the Christians.
And towards the end of his life Darwin lost his Christian faith.
And yet he did get some sense of moral feeling out of the evolution.
That he wrote that man having risen to the very summit of the organic scale.
Instead of just being placed there aboriginally, you know put there initially, the fact that he’d worked his way up.
That this he said may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.
And so Darwin saw his ideas of evolution leading towards the growing domination of man’s cooperative potential
would come to the top, whereas the selfish instincts of the animal would be pushed down.
And Wallace also with his ideas of evolution was thinking rather the same way when he became a Christian socialist.
But in the times of Newton there was a direct connection between religion and science
and the protestant scientists in Britain then,
they used to say in doing their work, their scientific work, they said we read the book of God -
in the sense of studying the natural world, which was part of God’s creation.
So they had the bible to read.
And they had the natural world to read.
And so at that time science was in effect a form of religious worship.
But after Newton, and more so after Darwin, the whole influence of science was to weaken the influence of religion.
And people began to use humanistic values instead of religious values.
And the social Darwinists claimed that Darwin’s ideas justified social and economic injustice -
you know the strongest would come to the top, the weakest would go down below -,
so that the fittest would use their power over the less fit.
Many western countries, I’m afraid, say yes make more money.
And the poor will stay down there.
We’re going back to the middle ages in some respects.
But Darwin’s ideas were used for many to justify many social economic thinking.
And you get the, it was used to justify capitalism, socialism and Nazism.
They call claim to derive support from Darwin, although Darwin himself seemed to have his heart in the right place.
By the end of the 18th century there were strongly differing views
as to whether the development of science really was of human benefit.
But on the positive side you had useful applications in agriculture and navigation
and general approaches to public health, which came rather before scientific medicine.
And you also had the democratising effect of science which influenced say thinkers in France
and getting rid of the aristocratic power in France.
But the so-called romantics, they were very upset by the brutality and bloodshed in the French revolution.
And they criticised science for developing what they claimed was a cold-blooded analytical materialism.
For example the poet Wordsworth, the English poet, who went over to Paris because he felt the French revolution was a good thing.
But when he saw it going, getting all bloody and murdering, he then came back to England.
He said about science, he said, ‘we murder to dissect’.
Science is chopping everything up into bits and destroying life was the meaning.
And Goethe tried to develop a new science which was less analytic and more holistic,
joining everything together and more spiritual.
But during the 19th century, however, science and technology went on developing,
and there were increasing beneficial applications of science.
And there were many great heroic scientific and medical figures in the 19th century.
And this strengthened the idea that science really did have intrinsic value.
Pasteur of course was one of these, who built up the germ theory of disease.
And his fame was increased greatly by the dramatic way he injected one of his research assistants
with the vaccine for rabies to test the safety of the vaccine.
And so he was rather a theatrical person.
And the French began to see Pasteur almost as a god - this type of thing in the 19th century.
And Germany of course you had Koch as a great man in a similar field.
Now the idea of the scientist risking his life, as Pasteur’s assistant did, to obtain scientific knowledge,
this is an important part of the image of the scientist as a hero.
And a well-known example of course is that of Doctor Walter Reed fighting yellow fever.
That some of his research assistants allowed themselves to be bitten by mosquitos which were carrying the yellow fever disease,
in order to test that the disease was in fact transmitted by the bites of mosquitos.
This was extremely dangerous and one of them actually died.
So that’s heroic, one would say.
And I think this whole idea of experimenting on yourself is an interesting one.
And one J. B. S. Haldane was one of these figures, a great biologist, mainly genetics,
that was in Britain that I happen to have the privilege of knowing.
And he was much concerned with social welfare and justice.
And he was opposed to using animals for scientific experimentation.
He said you should use human volunteers only and the animals cannot volunteer.
So you shouldn’t use them.
During the First World War he damaged his lungs testing gas masks on himself.
And after that war there was a great submarine disaster in which 90 sailors drowned
because they couldn’t get out of the submarine low in the sea.
And to find out what was going wrong, Haldane with other volunteers,
they sat in iced water and breathed carbon dioxide under 10 atmospheres pressure until they were unconscious.
I think one burst a lung and it was really a quite dangerous thing to do.
But Haldane was full of fun and he enjoyed doing things like that.
He was a real character.
I met him shortly after World War II in Cambridge when we were experimenting on gas-proof rooms
to protect civilians if cities might be attacked by poison gas.
Of course of all the heroes of science Einstein was probably the greatest.
He had broad semi-religious philosophical views.
And he saw moral truth as closely connected with scientific truth.
He was a bit like Pythagoras in that way.
And all his life he was just as much concerned with problems of war and social justice as he was with problems of science.
And his scientific theories of course brought remarkable unity into physics.
But Einstein was bitterly disappointed that physics led to the making of nuclear bombs.
And that the political leaders of the world would not agree to sharing the knowledge
and having international control of nuclear energy.
So in that respect there was no unity and that continues, sadly, in the world today.
Another result of this, he said that if he had his life over again, he would not choose to be a scientist.
Now Niels Bohr, the atomic physicist, he was rather like Einstein; he was also a great hero of science.
And he was very concerned about the possibility of nuclear war.
And he spent many years working, working, working trying to solve that problem.
But after the war the whole world of science rather changed.
So that heroes of science are not so likely to appear today - these are not very heroic times I am sorry to say.
That after the war science was increasingly institutionalised.
Einstein particularly regretted that.
That research became more expensive and there were fewer opportunities for scientists,
especially young scientists, to explore in new directions which were not very much controlled by grant-giving committees.
You know grant-giving committees are very good people and so on, they’re doing their job.
But I mean the nature of the structure is such
that it is difficult for them to say, 'oh here’s a few million dollars or something. Go and try your luck.'
They have to play safe.
However, after the World War II, in the first few years after the war
research had not settled down very much into an established pattern of work.
And there were possibilities of creating new interdisciplinary research which had not yet been fully explored.
And that was the position in relation to molecular biology in 1951,
when James Watson came to Europe from the United States to find out about DNA.
Now he knew a lot about virus reproduction and gene replication from American work.
And he discussed with me, we had quite a lot of discussions about the possible structure of DNA.
Because at that time in our laboratory we were making X-ray diffraction studies of the DNA structure,
Rosalind Franklin, myself, Alex Stokes and others.
And the discovery by Watson and Crick of the double helix of DNA, it was a remarkable success for the 2 sort of young scientists.
If I remember rightly I think James Watson was only 24 then, maybe I got, anyway within a year or 2, very young.
And this is possibly the most important biological discovery of this century, so people often claim.
Now how does James Watson fit into the hero category?
In his book called 'The Double Helix' Watson presents himself as a kind of hero of science.
But he very much stressed the competitive attitude in research.
And even seemed to have a conscious aim in doing the research that he might possibly obtain a Nobel Prize.
And this competitive element was illustrated by how when Linus Pauling had failed and got the structure wrong,
Watson and Crick went out to have a drink in the pub to celebrate.
Not really a very ideal thing for scientists to do.
Well, unity there.
And he also made himself appear somewhat as a trickster hero of folk stories.
You know in the old folk stories there’s always a naughty man who goes and plays tricks and is not very honest.
Watson sort of built himself this kind of image.
And I think that he did a disservice to science by emphasising the self-centred aspect of the scientist.
Because of course all scientists are self-centred to some extent; they’re bound to be because they’re human beings.
But I would say science is much more cooperative than the way Watson portrayed it in his book.
But it’s interesting that after his great discovery Watson worked very differently.
He concentrated on the cooperative aspect of science by writing really very high-quality text books of molecular biology
that were a great help to developing the whole subject.
And he edited journals.
And he was very successful as a director of leading research laboratories of molecular biology.
So he clearly felt a great responsibility to encourage and to build up this new field of research
which he had himself done so much to create.
But I would say that Watson is hardly a hero of science quite like Einstein or Niels Bohr, partly because the world has changed.
And I think that today although we have many very brilliant, very successful scientists,
I don’t think any of the people today have quite the same stature of those great heroes of the past.
I think it just isn’t possible in our present day work.
And in fact some people would say that the problems associated with science today have become so acute -
all these environmental problems and biological medical ethics and war and so on - that these have become so acute
that they would see the hero of science or heroism of science taking really the form of the antihero.
That they’d say well look at Robert Oppenheimer or Andrej Sacharow you see.
They wanted to stop the atom bombs.
First they made them and then they changed their minds.
First they were hero and then antihero.
But of course they’re more political in some ways that scientific.
And I think it would be a sad thing if the heroes of science today had to become rebels or dissidents
against the established body of scientific knowledge.
But I wonder if this is really true.
Is it wrong to be a rebel and a dissident against the existing established science?
Because what about Galileo?
Wasn’t Galileo our great hero now?
They say he was a rebel and a dissident against the established Aristotelian science of the time.
So maybe we do have to look at things a bit differently.
Possibly we do need to turn our backs on some aspects of science today and reinterpret the ideals of science.
Certainly there are some areas I think without any doubt we should turn our back on.
And I would like to finish by describing some rather unpleasant biological science,
which developed in World War II in various countries.
And which is continuing to develop in weapons research in chemical biological warfare right now in many countries in the world.
First of all take the example of Britain.
Being British I better talk about the horrible things the British did first.
We all did, everybody does horrible things.
The British did them.
Britain had signed the 1924 Geneva protocol banning the use of biological weapons.
But in 1944, when London was being attacked by the German V1 rockets,
Churchill, the Prime Minister, planned to retaliate with Anthrax bombs, Anthrax spores, bacterial spores, on Germany.
And he didn’t care about the moral and legal aspects of it.
That in a private discussion he said the following, he said the bombing of open cities, that was in World War I,
he said this was regarded as forbidden.
It was contrary to international law.
He says now everybody does it as a matter of course.
We all bomb open cities.
He says it’s simply a matter of fashion changing as it does between long and short skirts for women.
And so he intended that biological warfare, which people call public health in reverse,
that this should become the next fashion in war.
It’s really rather horrifying.
That’s what happens you know after you get into wars, people get more and more barbarous as the years go by.
And in Britain Churchill found biological scientists and chemists who were persuaded to work and develop these weapons.
And they were going to drop anthrax bombs against Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Aachen, Wilhelmshaven.
And they estimated they would kill over half the population in all those cities with the Anthrax spores.
Fortunately, the anthrax was being grown in special plants in the United States.
And there were production delays.
And because of that Churchill was not able to launch that attack.
But I think there’s little doubt that if the Americans had overcome the production difficulties, that would have taken place.
Well next example of what the Japanese did.
They probably did the most extensive research on biological weapons that anyone did, because they began in the late 1930s.
And they tested the weapons in the war against China.
Mainly they worked in unit 731, near Harbin.
And the unique feature of their experiments were that they used live people without anaesthetic.
And they killed about 3,000 prisoners of war in their experiments.
These people were mainly Chinese and Mongolians, but there were also some Americans and Russians.
And the individual people were sacrificed, killed at various stages as disease proceeded and autopsies were performed.
They made experiments also on freezing living people.
Freezing their arms until they fell off.
Destroying people’s livers by X-rays.
All kinds of experiments.
And a Japanese Professor has written a book where he claimed that they did fatal vivisection experiments
at Kyushu Imperial University in Tokyo on American flyers, airmen who had been shot down flying over Japan.
Well, presumably the Japanese doctors and scientists felt that they were morally justified in carrying out these experiments -
the process of rationalisation as one would say.
But in order to make it seem more acceptable they didn’t regard the experimental subjects as proper human beings.
They referred to them as logs of wood, you know something you’d throw on the fire to burn, not as human beings.
This made it easier for them to do it.
But after the war the American government experts, they were very impressed by the unique nature of the Japanese results
which had been obtained on live human beings.
They say we Americans, you know, we’re better people, we can’t do experiments on live people.
Therefore this is important to have these results.
And an official wrote the following; he said, the value to the United States of Japanese biological warfare data
is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the values accruing from war crimes prosecution.
So what did they do?
It was arranged, secretly, that the Japanese hand over all their data to the United States, secretly.
And in return the Japanese were, nothing happened to them, they were 'spared embarrassment' was the term
and allowed to work after the war in universities and other places in Japan.
And all this information was obtained from official United States papers
and was published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in October 1981.
So the Americans don’t really come out of it very well, really, or the Japanese.
So all nations get up to these horrible things.
And so now if you will forgive me, I shall now refer to the work of the Nazi doctors.
And my information on this, I am no expert, it’s largely derived from the recent book ‘The Nazi Doctors’
by the American psychologist Robert J. Lifton, published last year.
That apparently soon after Hitler came to power in 1933 coercive sterilisation was legalised.
The basic idea was that the life of certain people was unworthy of life.
And this programme actually was quite in line, similar to what various states in the United States were already doing.
That they were sterilising, compulsory sterilisation of handicapped people.
These were mainly people with mental problems.
And then you see, having done that you go a little bit further.
And you say, ok we will now have euthanasia.
We will kill the children in the mental hospitals who are, you know, barely human,
you would say 'life not worth living', we’ll kill them.
Then they went on to adult people, grown-up people, not just young children.
And eventually it got on to the whole genocide programme much later in the war.
Now the Nazi doctors claimed that their medicine was based on Hippocrates.
And it’s interesting to look at the Hippocratic Oath
and see that Hippocrates does not, from what I can see, say that mercy killing is a bad thing.
Anyway that was their claim.
And that euthanasia of the incurable sick or insane was a humane merciful, medical treatment.
And I was very interested to see that the German public at that time thought
that killing the adults, the grown-up mental patients in institutions, was wrong.
It had to be done secretly in gas chambers with carbon monoxide gas and false death certificates being issued.
But as the scale of the killing got bigger and bigger, the secrecy didn’t work well.
The relatives of the patients got to know what was happening
and the church leaders began speaking up, in particular also the catholic church, but many.
And as a result of this the official programme had to be stopped in 1941.
That’s what Lifton says in his book.
And after that, although the killing by doctors continued on a smaller scale by drugs and starvation
because there was great shortage of food then.
But it’s interesting that there was a basic humanity in the German people then
which stopped that programme, which I find very encouraging.
Now the Nazis attached great importance to biological theory.
That Rudolf Hess in 1934 said that National Socialism was nothing but applied biology.
And doctors had a very important role.
That they were to be not the caretakers of the sick, but they were to be cultivators of the genes.
But it was, as well as the mercy killing idea, it was also claimed
that humanity was being no longer genetically selected by a hostile environment - Darwinian ideas.
Because of this, human organisations must select people to prevent humanity degenerating genetically.
This theory is not really very sound scientifically, but it is plausible.
That the German people formed an organism, the health of which depended on killing the diseased part of the body.
Like if you have some gangrene in part of your body, you have to take it out to save the life.
That was the theory.
And this idea together with anti-Semitism led to the idea of killing the whole Jewish people,
the so-called final solution of the Jewish problem.
And this was also, it’s interesting to note that this was justified on the basis
that it was accepted practice for states and governments to say it is right to kill healthy young men in war,
therefore why not kill these rather subhuman people.
Why, what is so different about it?
It’s interesting the way it makes you look at war rather differently as an old established tradition.
And so in secret in the concentration camps the SS doctors healed the German people
by killing the Jews, the gypsies and the other non-Arians.
I didn’t know this, apparently the reason they had the gas chambers was that the 'Einsatzgruppen' shooting people face to face
was too disturbing psychologically, particularly shooting women and children.
It would upset, these people were fundamentally decent human beings deep down and they couldn’t take it.
You had to kill in a gas chamber where people wouldn’t see them dying.
That I think is also encouraging.
That even the, and the SS doctors had much difficulty in what they called healing by killing.
They drank heavily, had all kinds of difficulties in carrying on the work, but they did it of course all the same.
And they made some experiments on live prisoners for military or anthropological purposes.
Now I have discussed how scientists and doctors have been inspired to do heroic science
and also how they’ve done some very terrible inhumane things.
So how did they come to do these horrible things, whatever country of the world it is.
Human beings are basically the same in all countries.
I think the main thing is that under pressure from governments and the state
they have to find a way of overcoming their moral feelings.
That one way they do this is by intellectually rationalising their position.
Now this wasn’t very difficult for euthanasia of adult mental patients because there’s no clear-cut logical distinction
between that immoral practice and the traditional custom of encouraging very defective newborn babies to die, very old tradition.
So, you know, on a logical basis there’s no sort of difference, but morally it seems to us clear.
But logically you cannot draw a line.
So rationalisation was easy.
But it is more difficult on genocide because you had to appeal to spurious biological theory.
And of course one depended on inner fears and hates which all human beings have to some extent.
I think the terrible things that happened in the war then can happen to any of us.
They come out in one form in one country, another form in another.
Basically there are inner fears and hates in every human being.
And scientists working on weapons of mass destruction, they have to rationalise their position.
Because there is no simple logical proof that the theory of nuclear deterrents or of chemical weapons deterrents.
You can’t prove that logically that that theory is wrong.
And so in all cases intellectual processes do not provide sound moral barriers.
And therefore I believe it’s most important that scientists and doctors reinforce their intellectual work by moral feelings.
That we must be guided by the heart as well as the head.
And this is what in the past was difficult for scientists and doctors, often, to remember.
And also the scientists and doctors, they do terrible things
because they get absorbed in the intellectual challenge of the technical aspects of the work.
They become remote from the horror of seeing people dying.
And so the scientists we have today designing weapons or strategies of mass destruction, they don’t see people dying.
And you have the staff sitting in the nuclear weapons silos with these nuclear weapons.
These people don’t see the cities and all the people who would die, the weapons are targeted on those cities.
They are remote from it.
But I think direct contact with casualties would release the instinctive moral revulsion.
Hippocrates made clear that the strength of science depends largely on its emphasis on the need for direct contact
with concrete reality and the careful observation of that concrete reality.
That for scientists ideas in the head are very, very important.
But unless you have firm contact with reality you may not remain sane or be able to keep your moral sense.
You must have both.
And as scientists and doctors I think we need to be properly aware of the human dimension in science-based war.
When all these nuclear weapons and chemical weapons that Germany is full of, and that we’ve got stacks of it in Britain too.
We have to think about where are the human beings in this thing?
They’re not just technical things.
And I believe that war is directly opposed to the ethics of science, the ethos of science.
That the essence of war is disunity between nations; war needs secrecy; war needs deception.
Whereas science is based on unity, openness and honesty.
So I think it is fundamentally opposed.
So I think that all the weapons research is, you’re not being real scientist, I would say, if you do weapons research. (Hesitant applause)
About the ideals of science.
I hope that ideals will continue to inspire people.
Because if we don’t have ideals we cannot raise up above ordinary everyday sort of mediocre life.
We must have ideals to inspire us.
But we must also remember that ideals can be dangerous things.
That we know that the very good ideals of religion sometimes led to religious wars and hatred.
And of course national ideals have often led to terrible things as they did in with the Nazis, with the genocide.
But it’s happened in other countries.
The Turks and the Armenians with genocide there and many places in history.
I think we must therefore make very sure that our scientific ideals have in them very strong moral feeling.
Quite what this means is not very easy to explain and I don’t really know.
It’s something we need to work on.
But Alfred Nobel felt very strongly about that.
And we should be very clear that scientific ideals do not automatically make scientists superior human beings, far from it.
All of us human beings, scientists, doctors and others, we all have weaknesses and failures.
And we often use our ideals as scientists and doctors to cover up our own moral failures.
We have to be always working on that.
We must see the ideals of science and medicine as a great challenge to us as human beings.
Something to live up to.
It’s not an easy way of being good people.
It means very hard, difficult work, like the work, the labours of a hero, to live up to those ideals.
And in facing this challenge we need to be inspired by the moral stand that people have taken in the past.
For example in Britain the British Medical Research Council in World War II, it refused to help Churchill with Anthrax bombs.
There were some other scientists who did it but not, officially, the British Medical Research Council said no, we’re medical.
Now in Japan we know that there were many, many Japanese Buddhists and others who opposed their nation’s military policies.
And as I’m speaking here in Germany to an audience consisting largely of German medical students,
I think it is appropriate that I refer to what you well know already:
the medical students at Munich who organised the White Rose movement in 1942 and sacrificed their lives in opposing Nazi policy.
So I think we should be inspired by the fine examples of the past,
so that we can face the many very serious problems which exist in all parts of the world today.
Thank you.
(Applause)