Category Medicine

Disturbing and Fascinating Documentary on 1940s Experiments

On Archive.org, one can find an enormous number of intriguing and wonderous things. Every once in a while, though, you will stumble upon something that is a bit beyond the pale. What I have linked below is a short documentary that is part of the Perlinger Archives. It documents the, frankly, disturbing experiments conducted in the Soviet Union during the early 1940s. These experiments focused on the revival of dogs that had been clinically dead for a period of time, including just the revival of a severed head.

Another Vaccine Fallacy: Too Many, Too Soon!

One of the most dangerous and irresponsible non-scientific mindsets of the last 15 years is the anti-vaccination movement. It can be directly linked to dozens of deaths and thousands of unneeded illnesses. One of the more frequent ant-vaxxer refrains of the past decade has been that giving the standard US vaccination schedule exposes young ones to too many vaccines/antigens/whatevers too early in life.

Academic Freedom, Down Syndrome, and Cognitive Dissonance

My fellow SINner Russell Blackford has put up a post called “Down syndrome, disability, academic freedom” that he is getting a lot of flack about.
In it, he defended the rights of Professor D Gareth Jones of Otago University to publish an academic paper called “Testing times: do new prenatal tests signal the end of Down syndrome?” In this open-access article, Professor Jones and his co-author (a student) discuss the current state of prenatal screening for Down Syndrome (DS) in New Zealand and possible implications.