To the editor: The work of Dr. Kalyanam Shivkumar, a professor of medicine at UCLA, to replace the anatomical atlas widely used by Nazi physician Eduard Pernkopf is commendable, and others in the medical field should aggressively follow his lead. There must be numerous examples of ethically failed medical research resulting in seemingly indispensable contemporary reference papers.
As a high school science teacher, I received an ethics lesson that asked students to examine the moral conundrum of the contemporary use of hypothermia research conducted by Nazi scientists on non-consenting Allied airmen, in violation of ethics. medicine and the Geneva Conventions. My goal was to make them reflect on whether good can come from evil.
In this case, I could let my students off the hook because the so-called researchers were sadists and their scientific rigor was poor, making their results unscientific.
Today we have tremendously sophisticated computational and diagnostic tools for examining the human body and abundant ways to gain new and better medical knowledge. Ethically compromised resources must be discovered and replaced, wherever they occur.
David Seidel, Beverly Hills
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To the editor: My father, a Jewish general surgeon, was totally enamored of his Pernkopf anatomy texts, which he considered far better than those of Dr. Frank Netter or even Gray's Anatomy. When I became a surgeon, he gave them to me.
I have known their origins for 10 years and have struggled with whether to burn them or not. I decided to keep them not only to honor my father, but also to “never forget.”
Judith Braslow Zacher, MD Palm Desert
