Should we discard achievements made by unlikable people?

[CapnAwesome]

Unit 731 might be a better example; Around the time of World War II, Japan made quite a few medical breakthroughs, including discovery of the mechanism behind frostbite, and the day-to-day progression of Anthrax and bubonic plague. How did they do this? Human experimentation. Human experimentation that often involved things like vivisection of humans, people being raped and forcibly
infected with syphilis and (I did not believe this was real the first time I heard it) freezing one person's limbs and throwing scalding hot water (over 50 centigrade) on them so the skin and muscle fell off. They took the dehumanization inherent in such an enterprise to new levels, calling the human subjects Maruta, the Japanese word for “lumber,” because even treating those subjects (mostly Chinese POWs and their families, including three-month-old infants, though they became more diverse with WW2) like animals was considered unfair even to animals. Unit 731 seems to be less prone to fudging their data for the benefit of the Emperor than the Nazis, and yet, they did much the same thing, and quite a bit of it was even more fucked up than the Nazi experiments (no small feat.) But it still had an undeniable positive effect on medicine. If there’s ever a successful biological warfare attack on America (or whichever nation you live in,) if/when scientists find a way to restore things to normal, whatever solution they find WILL inevitably use Unit 731’s findings.

I'm not doubting this story, but how do we know they didn't fudge the data if we can't recreate it ourselves. That's how we confirm science, by recreating experiments.

Also a lot of that just sounds like torturing people, not a valid controlled (repeatable) experiment.

Also what is the undeniable positive influence on medicine? Can you be more specific? I mean, antibiotics had been invented so the plague wasn't really a problem.