The Science edition from the 24th of February also describes an online collection of “Twisted Science” exibits. It is about the online version of an exhibit of “deadly medicine” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., documenting distorted science practices by Nazi scientists and doctors, in order to justify their “racial hygiene” policies, materialized in the murder of millions of Jews and other people considered inferior. Profiles of several prominent scientists involved (some of them- incredibly- resuming or even improving their careers after the war) are also briefly presented. A very welcome initiative of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum- and clearly a must for any scientist and not only- as lesson of what horrific ends unsound and purposely unethical scientific reasoning can be used for.
This automatically links with something else: how on Earth can we still have those humanoids with no brain arguing that the Holocaust did not take place, despite every evidence pointing to that? A recent such case is the one of “historian” David Irving. I guess the most important thing here is that the subject himself (partially) admitted – at the very end of the day- his errors, and not so much the legal punishment (I have doubts whether the enactment and enforcement of such legislation instead of complete freedom of speech BUT concerted and sustained ex-post criticism of, particularly in this case, all the academic community, and eventual academic downgrading based on scientific grounds of the subject, is more efficient). Something certain – unfortunately- not to happen (admitting errors and apologizing) in the case of a certain islamic president (or for that reason, the supreme leader of that state).
