In Vienna's central cemetery 789 children tortured and murdered by Nazi doctors were laid to rest last month.

Two black urns with the brains of two of them were given a formal public burial.

The remains of about 600 other children were buried privately over a two week period.

These physically or mentally handicapped children died between 1940 and 1945.

They had been sent to a prestigious hospital, Am Spiegelgrund, for quality treatment.

Instead, their "worthless lives" were poisoned with sleeping tablets and starved until they died of pneumonia.

In life the Nazis regarded them as "useless eaters", but in death they were far from useless to the doctor who killed them.

For decades, their brains, carefully preserved in formaldehyde or dissected for anatomical slides, were used for neurological research.

The doctor, Heinrich Gross, escaped justice after the War and went on to become a leading neurologist.

He wrote psychiatric reports for Austrian courts until 1998 and published many papers on brain deformations, basing his work mainly on his Spiegelgrund victims.

In 1975, Gross was even awarded a medal of honour for his scientific contributions.

Atrocities like these have made Austrians and Germans wary of human embryo experimentation. Victims of the Nazi ideology know all too well that respect for human life is a fragile virtue.

And before Parliament ratifies the decision of the Council of Australian Government to allow destructive research on unwanted IVF embryos, we ought to reflect on the lessons of Dr Gross's victims.

Don't get me wrong. Embryo research is NOT Nazi-inspired.

This would be a gross distortion of largely well-intentioned efforts to cure children and adults suffering from degenerative diseases.

More to the point, Nazism was an archaic form of eugenic socialism. With the gigantic power of the Nazi state behind them, German and Austrian doctors implemented this, betraying their commitment to protect and heal the weakest and most defenceless members of society, the mentally and physically disabled.

Destructive human embryo research, on the other hand, is largely a profit-driven, free-market affair which meshes neatly with the privatisation and outsourcing of eugenics.

An eminent UK psychologist, Richard Lynn, has even just published a book, Eugenics: A Reassessment, arguing that it's time for a fresh look at the unjustly maligned practice engineering the genetic quality of the population.

It fits nicely into our consumer mentality, he says.

No, destructive embryo research is not Nazi-inspired, but you would have to be Blind Freddy to overlook the parallels.

In 1949, the chief medical consultant to the prosecution at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, Dr Leo Alexander, reflected on the dangers of unravelling the thread of respect for human life: "it is important to realise that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude toward the non-rehabilitable sick."

In the 21st Century, the impetus is the fact that because embryos are "unwanted" or "surplus" or going to die anyway, they are unworthy of the incipient life they do have.

The good intentions of skilful doctors do not weaken the parallel. Nazi doctors at Nuremberg made constant allusions to medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath in their testimony.

They even seem to have convinced themselves that their crimes were consistent with their high principles.

To be sure, IVF embryos do not look like grown-up persons. But they do look like one-minute old persons. They are self-directed, purposeful bundles of potential babyhood, childhood and adulthood.

However, like the murdered Austrian children, they are voiceless and defenceless. To the ideologues of the consumer society, just as to Heinrich Gross, they are valueless lives with invaluable body parts.

And tragically, judging from the current record of progress, the dissection of unwanted IVF embryos may not be value for money. Thus far, not a single patient has ever been treated successfully with human embryonic stem cells. Not one.

On the other hand, adult stem cells, extracted from placentas, children or adults without the slightest ethical complication, have already treated patients successfully for a number of conditions, including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes.

The Austrians have given us a way to cope with the thousands of parentless embryos in the freezers of IVF clinics.

We, too, can bury them.

Let's repudiate the callous consumerism of "use it or lose it".

michael.cook@australasianbioethics.org. MICHAEL COOK is the editor of "Australasian Bioethics Information", an email newsletter.