Should we discard achievements made by unlikable people?

[CapnAwesome]

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.

The beginning of science isn't a controlled experiment. It's observation. "What happens if we stick these guys in freezing water? What happens if we saw off their arms?" By the time you make a controlled experiment, you're already about halfway through the process.

Also, recreating experiments isn't always necessary. Some experiments lay the groundwork for prediction-- someone else has done the experimentation, and the proof is in the predictive power of a resultant theory, equation, or relationship that couldn't have been determined without the experimentation.

For example, I don't need to recreate Newton's experiments to know what gravity is. That science has been done already, and the subsequent experiments can safely rely on it until for some reason (or in some new context) it is no longer reliable.

You don't have to recreate Newton's experiments because lots of other people already had. Not so with the Nazi experiments. Also is it groundwork? Sure. I'm not at all convinced that we couldn't have gotten there without torturing people to death. We could have reached the same conclusion.

Its so strange that people think we learned so much applicable science but normally can just come up with the hypothermia example. Which is both extemely minor, and probably something we could have figured out anyway. And, like I said, we can't validate their data anyway.