Don't reject valuable data just because their source was unsavory. So says Alan C. Nixon (The Scientist, November 18, page 9), and adds that rejection smacks of intellectual dishonesty and muddled thinking. A different view, which I hold, is that when society willfully uses such data, it tacitly endorses the means by which they were obtained. The suffering of prisoners experimented on without their fully informed consent should be in vain, precisely because some investigators as honest and unmuddled as Nixon think otherwise.
B. RAYMOND FINK, M.D.
University of Washington School of Medicine
Seattle, Wash. 98195
