Dr. Jack Kessler is chief of neurology at Northwestern University’s medical school. He has devoted his professional life to easing suffering by trying to regenerate nerve cells.
Dr. Josef Mengele was Hitler’s “Angel of Death.” He killed concentration-camp prisoners in painful medical experiments designed to create a master race.
James Dobson’s recent attempt to link the two physicians by comparing Nazi torture tests to embryonic stem-cell research places the Focus on the Family founder exactly where he deserves to be:
On the lunatic fringe.
In a radio broadcast Wednesday from Colorado Springs, Dobson set a new standard for wackiness for a guy who already squeezed SpongeBob SquarePants for being soft on homosexuals.
“The thing that means so much to me here on this issue (embryonic stem-cell research) is that people talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabetes,” Dobson said. “There’s no indication yet that they’re gonna do that, but people say that, or spinal-cord injuries or such things.
“But I have to ask this question: In World War II, the Nazis experimented on human beings in horrible ways in the concentration camps, and I imagine, if you wanted to take the time to read about it, there would have been some discoveries there that benefited mankind. …
“We condemn what the Nazis did because there are some things that we always could do but we haven’t done because science always has to be guided by ethics and by morality. And you remove ethics and morality, and you get what happened in Nazi Germany.”
The distribution of Dobson’s comments by liberal groups set off a firestorm among folks like Kessler.
Comparing stem-cell researchers to Nazis, Kessler said, is like comparing Dobson, an icon of religious conservatism, to Torquemada, who oversaw the burning of heretics in the Spanish Inquisition.
“We should make it clear to everybody how outrageous his comments are,” Kessler said. “This is exactly the kind of person who in the past would have put me to the stake for saying that the world was round.
“We’re dealing with a little tiny ball of cells, perhaps 100 to 140 cells. It is not a human being. There is no torture involved. There is no pain involved. There is no desire to inflict pain. There is no compromise of human dignity.
“The goal is to spare human beings pain and suffering.”
Dobson’s goal seems to be to cynically misrepresent science and scientists as the U.S. Senate considers a bill to expand embryonic stem-cell research.
“The analogy comparing the Nazi human experiments conducted during WWII and today’s embryonic stem-cell research is historically and ethically accurate, appropriate, and we stand by it,” Focus on the Family bioethics analyst Carrie Gordon Earll said Thursday.
Dobson cannot escape this idiotic excess. No one is going to laugh off a Nazi analogy like they laughed off an attack on SpongeBob. It just isn’t funny.
Accusing stem-cell researchers of lacking ethics simply ignores the truth.
“We undergo extraordinary scrutiny,” said Kessler, whose own daughter is a wheelchair user because of a spinal-cord injury suffered while skiing. “Certainly more scrutiny than a man who can shoot from the hip about a topic about which he knows nothing.
“More importantly – and this is really the most important thing – the majority of Americans do not agree with him. The majority of Congress doesn’t agree.”
Count Holocaust survivor Jack Adler among the mainstream millions. Adler, who lives in Lone Tree, looked Josef Mengele in the face at Auschwitz. The “Angel of Death” personally picked Adler for an experiment to determine how much air pressure it took to kill a human being.
Adler escaped by hiding in a different barracks at the concentration camp.
“Of course it hurts,” Adler said of Dobson’s comment. “It’s like … Ward Churchill comparing the victims of 9/11 to ‘little Eichmanns.”‘
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
