If someone conducts unethical research unbeknownst to anybody, but produces positive results, what would happen to the research once discovered? I was just wondering about this specific scenario.

Say someone was researching nature vs. nurture, but his experiments involved keeping babies in a controlled environment for the first 10 years of their life. His research is secret and he has ways to smuggle children for his research (don't ask how).

After 15 years, he publishes a paper and confirms that there is a set amount of characteristics that can be transferred via genes. 

What would become of the researcher and his research? Will the researcher be jailed, but the research results recognized?



This question is about unethical research in general, not just ones involving human subjects.

P.S. No babies were harmed in the making of this post
Unfortunately, history has already forced this question upon us, and the answers are not entirely clear.  The Nazis inflicted widespread and breathtakingly horrifying human medical experiments on their victims during the Holocaust. These yielded quite a bit of medical data, that some want to unearth and apply today.

This has ignited quite a bit of debate on the ethics of using this most obviously and supremely unethical research.  The science may be dubious as well, given the circumstances under which it was performed.  An excellent discussion of the dilemma may be found in the article "The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments" by Baruch Cohen.  In essence, Cohen argues that in certain extreme cases it may be possible to use the data, but only when accompanied by strong condemnation of the methods and only when it concerns information that is both otherwise impossible to obtain and of life-saving importance.

Nazi medicine is an extreme case, but unfortunately by no means isolated, and the judgement of history and science on these studies contains less uniform condemnation than we might like.  The modern consensus, however, seems to be that except in very unusual circumstances, unethical studies should not be rewarded in any way by recognition.