"Depends on the motivation for the research. You trust Nazi work on smoking because it is unrelated to Nazi beliefs. Do you trust Nazi research on eugenics? Of course not. Motive makes a difference, pretending otherwise is sticking your head in the sand."
As I recall the recent research on the matter, Nazi research on smoking was done for the worst of motives.
The Nazis preoccupation with pollution was closely related to their pursuit of purity, which also motivated their research into racial purity.
The point was that with the very worst motives, they discovered something that was true. Sadly, anti-German prejudice after the war meant that the association between smoking and cancer, that scientists had demonstrated, was forgotten, until US research reproduced their efforts after the war.
In the same way, the science behind Von Braun's rockets was good science, even though its motivation was the obliteration of my grandparents.
Motive can motivate you, but it cannot make falsehood into truth. The eugenic 'science' was not just ugly motives, but bad science. Mengele's hideous torture chamber never produced one shred of real understanding. The test of the science is the reproducibility of its findings, not the motivations of its sponsors.
Refusing to learn from science that is supported by people you do not like is the very definition of prejudice. It is putting your head in the sand. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040922/a81669ef/attachment.htm>