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MartinB comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
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one question I pondered at times is if the experiments done on prisoner by Mengele and others actually lead to anything interesting. In theory the lack of ethics would allow for more research with less effort. But it seems they did not, and actually worked rather sloppy. I guess that is preferably, because otherwise the ethics people would have a hard time keeping eager researchers in check.
There are interesting data on hypothermia based on Nazi human experimentation, which are especially interesting because it's impossible to replicate these measurements for obvious reasons. The ethics of using and citing those have been a matter of controversy for decades:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experi02_no.html
Otherwise, however, the human experiments done by Nazi doctors seem to have been scientifically worthless. Mengele in particular was just a particularly cruel dilettante.
Poll: what studies would you do if ethics were not a constraint?
There's a lot of stuff involving patient secrecy that would be convenient to not worry about. Conglomerating everyone's medical records could result in dramatic gains in knowledge on efficacy of treatment. But it should be possible to do that in a way that respects patient secrecy, and I don't think ethics is the true rejection there.
There are a number of cases where people consider it unethical to use controls. AZT is a famous example, where they stopped the study midway through because AZT was so effective for the experimental group, but then some nasty side effects started showing up- and it was unclear how much was due to the AZT, because there wasn't a control group to compare to anymore.
(Assuming that not only institutional ethics but my own sense of morality is not a constraint.)
A lot of the really interesting things we know about broad-scale human neurology, particularly some tricky stuff about the nature of consiousness, are due to the study of people who have suffered brain damage. If there were no ethical constraints, I would deliberately induce carefully controlled forms of brain damage on humans and observe the results.
I'm afraid I have no citations handy for this, but I seem to recall reading that a number of Nazi medical experiments, such as the ones simulating (fatal) high altitude exposure, were in fact quietly studied and used by the occupiers, in addition to the more famous rocketry and other research. (Probably the more bizarre experiments, like Mengele's torture of twins, did not attract the military's interest.)
I also read once that Japanese intelligence agencies made a deal with the Americans to turn over the results from their biowarfare units in exchange for them being quietly overlooked and not included in the war crimes tribunals that executed the likes of Hideki Tōjō.