I have a question.
Would anyone have a "problem" with this story line.. if it had occured in season 3?
Actually I kind of would because alot of our advances have come from shady means if you really think about it.
It's a sad fact that it happened that way ,but that's the way it is.
Well, to use your original post, I "see a flaw in the logic of your argument".
You argue that because the BORG fight/conquer/assimlate their foes, that anything Seven contributes to Voyager is tainted. Since B'Elanna uses that contribution, she's not allowed to have an opinion that prevents her from being cured using data obtained from despicable means.
Further more, you and others argue that no-one is allowed to have an opinion/practice a philosophy that prevents them from using data obtained by despicable means.
Let's just look at the BORG question, first.
The BORG did not experiment on anyone to obtain their knowledge. They
stole the knowledge from other races by assimilation. Something that B'Elanna herself confirmed for us in
"Scorpion".
JANEWAY: B'Elanna, it's clear from the Borg database that they know practically nothing about Species 8472.
TORRES: That's right. The Borg gain knowledge through assimilation.
What they can't assimilate, they can't understand.
Well, one can argue that assimilation is "despicable"... but as far as the cow is concerned, so is eating a hamburger. Fact is, that's just one of the ways the BORG as a species reproduces and survives... just like that's how McDonalds and Burger King remain profitable.
In fact, the Queen herself has commented on the "benefits" of assmiliation in
"Dark Frontier"
SEVEN: Three hundred thousand individuals have been transformed into drones. Should they be congratulated as well?
QUEEN: They should be. They've left behind their trivial, selfish lives and they've been reborn with a
greater purpose. We've delivered them from chaos into order.
The BORG never took another humanoid and placed them in an ice water bath and watched their life signs as the temperature dropped, to determine how low was too low before the being died. They never experimented on the humanoid to determine how slow was too slow to rewarm them before the brain experienced catastrophic failure.
The BORG didn't infect humanoids purposefully like the Cardassians did, nor experiment on those infected beings to see what treatment worked "the best".
I understand that you and many of the people posting in this thread see "no problem" with using the data mined from such experiments. What I
do not understand is the prevalent opinion that because you/they don't understand how someone can believe in "burying that research", that means the Voyager writer's/story premise is
flawed.
"Voyager" isn't the only TV show that has brought this subject up. "The Pretender" in the 1990's also mentioned the Nazi research on Twins, when one of its main characters admitted to being one of the children subjected to such experiments.
Back in the early 1990's I sat through a lecture where the researcher prefaced his remarks by saying the data he was presented WAS obtained from the Nazi experiments on cold stress, and offered to allow people to leave if they could not be a party to such information. Again, you may not understand how anyone can be upset by this data, but they exist, they aren't simply a figment of a Voyager writer's flawed imagination.
As we get further and further from the time of such "despicable" research, its harder for people to put a face and a name to the men and women that suffered such atrocites, whether they be in Tuskeegee, or Germany. I think the mere fact that so many people believe that the problem with "Nothing Human" could be solved by changing the Crell Mossett hologram to look Bajoran suggests that such philosophical issues need to be raised
more often.
Who was it that said, killing 1 man is murder, killing a million men is a statistic? In my opinion, whenever the suffering of another human being can be equated with "research on rabbits", our hearts have grown too cold.
