I doubt it has anything to do with him. My comment was in reference to the context of the post, whereby medical experimentation on humans is being regarded as progress and being held back by ethics.

This is obvious though

currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.

...but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn't care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you "believe" in it, which is the beautiful thing about science

so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)

Now, taking a step back, maybe you're right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that's getting into a whole "sociology of science" discussion.

Unfortunately, research on prisoners and concentration camp victims did produce new valuable medical information.

Most of the field of gynecology is based on experiments done on women slaves, where the "doctors" decided their victims conveniently didn't have nerve endings.

Ethics throttles research.

But I am aghast at the thought that we should permit unethical research in the pursuit of, at the end of the day, greed.

And I say this as a professional scientist.

I can't believe this conversation is even necessary.

Many kinds of early-in-life medical interventions can have permanent negative effects if they go bad, but nonetheless our ethical standards don't preclude them. This is a field where the ethical standards are suffocatingly high without good reason. As an aside, we should consider euthanizing newborns who suffer debilitatingly severe negative side effects due to any kind of failed medical intervention (with parental consent, of course). This will directly improve quality-of-life standards and also allow us to lower ethical standards on experimental treatments too.