the real life example were the Nazi hypothermia experiments --the consensus, last I checked, was that the data was not used.

Of course, the truly pointless unethical American study was Tuskegee syphilis progression to dementia sample of African American subjects after there was already a cure for the disease...among other, wildly unethical studies...

"that doesn't justify using people in laboratory experiments"

uhhh, exactly how does holodoc think medical science works?
We use people in laboratory experiments all the damn time. It's called double-blind testing and it means that very sick people get given a placebo that we know does nothing.

I don't remember this episode, but I'm surprised at this lack of nuance from Star Trek.

And holo-space-nazi is right... it's funny how ethics go out the window when one of the main cast members life is threatened. But if a red-shirt is on the table....

Anyway, there's a massive difference between USING knowledge obtained by unethical means and GAINING knowledge by unethical means.

Don't get me wrong, medical ethics is really important. But throwing away knowledge after the fact is not only pointless, it's immoral. Especially in this case, where you're not even using the person who did the research, just a digital representation of them.