US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis 1945-1970 (2011)

Of course ethics does need to make sure that the testing isn't going to harm the participants directly, which is nice and simple in your example, but it also needs to make sure that any measurements will be stored (and anonymised) in ways that conform to your friend's country's healthcare data laws. It needs to make sure there are adequate data protection plans. It needs to ask questions like have they considered ways in which they might accidentally create a device with racial bias (the way pulse oximetres are often worse at reading the blood oxygen level of people with dark skin as they were made by and tested on the fingers of white people). Etc.

Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.

For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments.

Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole.

There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it.

[0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder...

[1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...

You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk.

So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.

On the other hand, LNT utterly fails to address the well-documented trend that people in areas of high background exposure experience lower rates of cancer. The mechanisms of this effect are not understood, though often hypothesized, nor is there any strong argument for a particular upper limit (though plenty of known examples, like smoking and frequent flying, lie beyond it.)

I wouldn't advise anyone microdose on radon, nor ignore the risk of radon if you're in the habit of keeping your modern home closed up... but this matter is not settled as you portray.

Edit: sorry for my other flippant comment. The confident misunderstanding of science got me a little worked up.

I think all humans suck, just like all humans have the capacity to be kind, considerate and "good". It depends on the circumstances.

Most importantly, I think the somewhat common notion that inhabitants of Germany during the 30s and 40s were intrinsically evil is a very dangerous belief—if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.

This article has been hugged to death, but I assume they're referring to Operation LAC. [1] "We" weren't spraying these neighborhoods because they had black people, but because they had 'the projects' - poor urban housing buildings. These densely populated areas with large sprawling concrete prison-like apartment buildings, were extremely similar in design to the areas in the USSR we might attack with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. And so we wanted to see how such an attack would play out.

It's the same thing with Tuskegee. The people involved likely envisioned themselves saving millions of lives, and gaining invaluable information that could be used to treat not only syphilis but any other sort of other diseases which might manifest similarly. The exact same logic people use today to experiment with gain of function with ever more dangerous diseases, even as diseases escape from labs at a frighteningly high rates. [2] So why only black people with Tuskegee? Because syphilis rates in black Americans were pushing near an order of magnitude higher than in other groups.

This 'greater good' rhetoric is rhetorically appealing, because it sounds reasonable. But the outcomes are scarcely desirable, because the ends people seek with their means very rarely ever comes to pass. But the horrible things they do in the interim trying to get there, all most certainly do happen. If somebody starts talking about the greater good, it should be a major red flag. One needs not justify good and just actions, and those are the sort we ought pursue.

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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_LAC

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

This would entail the destruction of physical evidence of what happened.

I'm saying that the law of truly large numbers applies here. The US government has done exceptionally good things and exceptionally bad things because it does a ridiculous number of things. It simply does more than any other organization; it has been the world's largest organization for some time.

Now what is the measure by which that is judged? Of course, if we are to say that only the governments with a spotless record are trustworthy, then the only trustworthy governments are fictional ones.

That might be a bit unreasonable of an expectation for an organization made up of fallible humans, though, so many reason that some non-zero number of mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, even within bounds of trustworthiness.

At the end of the day, trust is a personal judgement call. But it's my opinion that if you have an impossible standard of trust, you may just have an unreasonable opinion.

The regulators exist because we can’t trust the private companies. Who regulates the regulators?

The whole thing depends on the integrity of our institutions. If those institutions fail to uphold their trustworthiness, then we won’t be able to trust the process.

Page 69:

"The St. Louis study may have involved far more than biological “simulants”, per the official military talking point. There is indication of a secret study conducted in tandem to the “official” military-sponsored St. Louis aerosol study. The second study, which for some reason warrants even more secrecy than its parallel study, appears to have been connected to a new type of deadly nuclear weapon, one of many being developed by the coalition, to be tested on unsuspecting residents of St. Louis"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray