For those who don't know Bad Science is a column in the Guardian newspaper where Dr Ben Goldacre talks about badly conducted, badly reported and manipulated science. It's well worth reading.

In a recent column he was talking about dealing with information and research from questionable sources. The first part deals with the effects of tobacco on alzheimer's and the different results provided by those with links to the tobacco industry against those without such links. He then goes on to talk about a very early paper which was well researched and found a link between smoking and lung cancer. This paper has largely been ignored by the scientific community. The problem with it is that the research was conducted in Nazi Germany.

In Nazi Germany two researchers, Schairer and Schöniger, worked on biological theories of degenerate behaviour under Professor Karl Astel, who helped organise the operation that murdered 200,000 mentally and physically disabled people.

In 1943 the researchers published a well-conducted study demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Their paper wasn't mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, it was referred to only four times in the 60s, once in the 70s, and then not again until 1988, despite providing a valuable early warning on a killer that would cause 100 million early deaths in the 20th century.

As far as I am aware (and I stand open to correction) the above study was carried out using ethical means. It is merely ignored because of it's associations with other research carried out under the Nazi regeme.

As for research carried out in unethical ways, in one way it seems foolish to ignore good science because it may have been researched using unethical means, but by using the results we do at least partially validate the methods used to obtain them. And as such we do create a temptation for researchers that as long as their results are good enough we will turn a blind eye to their methods.

So I do feel uneasy about benefiting from the results of unethical research (which we pretty much all do, without necessarily being aware of), but I still benefit from it, still use it. How I deal with that is in insisting in strict legislation and strict independent ethical committees to constantly oversee and control research to make sure that dangerous unethical practices are stamped out of science for good.