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Physicians played a significant role in the atrocities of the Holocaust, but does that make it unethical to use data from their experiments for scientific advancement? A seminar series will tackle that dilemma next month at Drew University.

The school's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Study will sponsor four sessions on the bioethical issues unique to the Holocaust and the roles of Nazi doctors on March 4, 11, and 25 and April 1 from 4-6 p.m. at Drew's campus in Madison.

Stacy Gallin, a doctoral student in the university's medical humanities program who will facilitate these classes, came up with the idea while working on an independent study last spring about Nazi Germany's extermination of Jews based on eugenics, a theory which promotes the classification of certain groups as "degenerate" or "unfit." She pitched the idea to Dr. Ann Saltzman, the center's co-director, and the rest of the organization's board of associates.

"I think people don't have a sense of how deeply embedded biological and medical views were in the Nazi ideology and how deeply involved doctors were," Saltzman said. "I know that Stacy will be raising some issues that are still relevant."

The mission of the center, founded in 1992, is to "commemorate those who perished in the Holocaust and to celebrate those who survived; to educate upcoming generations to 'remember for the future'; and to dedicate our energies to ongoing Research and Scholarship," according to Drew's Web site.

Gallin said that while most people view the Holocaust from a purely historical perspective, the biomedical aspects of Nazi atrocities may have more modern relevance.

"As opposed to just studying the Holocaust as one of the dark moments in world history, this has much more current implications for medicine and science, so we can take the things in the past and look toward the future," Gallin said.

"The unique thing about the Holocaust is that it is the only example of medically sanctioned genocide, because the physicians worked with the Nazis to do a lot of these things," she added.

The first session will provide an introduction to biomedical ethics in the Holocaust as well as an overview of the field in general, Gallin said. The second class will move on to how the Nazis created and implemented their theory of racial hygiene, focusing on how Nazi ideology became national policy.

Ethical debate will come to the forefront during the final two sessions, as the third will examine whether the Nazis' experimental discoveries provide morally acceptable data for use in today's scientific world.

"Obviously, lots of experiments were done on participants who were not volunteers, who did not want this to happen, and who never should have had this happen to them," Gallin said.

The fourth and final session will deal with the ethical implications of the Holocaust for the future of biomedical ethics (as well as the present), exploring potential impacts on issues such as genetic testing, the Human Genome project, and euthanasia.

Arthur Kaplan's "When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust" will be the de facto textbook for the course, Gallin said, while other readings include the perspectives of scientists who argue that data gleaned by Nazi doctors is indispensable, as well as accounts from Holocaust survivors who believe the use of that data is unethical.

Gallin said she understands that this topic might be particularly sensitive for Holocaust survivors or their families, and will therefore try to include the perspectives of those who attend the sessions as much as possible (stressing that she is a "facilitator" for the course, as opposed to an instructor).

"It's not an easy topic, there are no easy answers, and nothing is black and white. I certainly will not pretend to have the answers to these questions, because I don't," Gallin said. "The goal of the seminar is to provide some information to the participants of the class, whatever their backgrounds may be, to take the objective information and form their own conclusions opinions about it."

The registration fee for the series is $40. Educators who take part in the series will be eligible for professional development credits, which will be issued after the last seminar. For more information, call the Drew University Center for Holocaust and Genocide Study at (973) 408-3600 or email ctrholst@drew.edu.