Sir

Your editorial “Hollow apologies should be avoided” (Nature 403, 813; 2000) noted that Hubert Markl, president of the Max Planck Society (MPS), “is right to resist pressure to apologize” for the participation of German scientists in Nazi experiments.

Subsequently, Bernd Wirsing of the MPS wrote (Nature 404, 222; 2000) that “President Markl has already publicly apologized”, although reference to the MPS website reveals that this apology is weakened somewhat by circumlocutory equivocation. The issue of apology by proxy remains relevant in this context and in others.

The Pope and President Wahid of Indonesia have recently apologized for the sins and crimes of their predecessors, but the Australian prime minister, John Howard, has consistently refused to apologize to Aboriginal Australians for generations of abuse and neglect by governments. Howard's rationale is much the same as that put forward in Nature's editorial: the successors of those who committed crimes in the past do not have the moral authority to apologize on their behalf.

Such caution is mistaken. Consider an analogy: if one were enfeebled or incapacitated, it would be reasonable to place one's affairs in the hands of an attorney who would then assume one's legal powers and exercise them in one's stead for one's good.

Markl is the president of the organization that fully took over the members of its predecessor, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, under whose auspices experiments on human beings took place. Markl is in the position of acting for a morally incapable predecessor. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was morally deficient in using children and other Nazi victims in its experiments. Recalcitrant members might well refuse to acknowledge the wrongfulness of their actions or to ask for forgiveness. So indeed, might many of our forebears and contemporaries in this country.

But the MPS and Australia's leaders are not deficient in that respect. They can act as the rightful exercisers of moral authority here, and they ought to do so precisely on the grounds that Markl advances: that those who performed experiments on humans or so egregiously treated Aborigines were deficient in their moral understanding and certainly incapacitated from making a genuine apology.

Finally, it is wrong to argue that an apology needs to be made only to the survivors of atrocious policies and practices. It surely needs to be made to all the descendants of those who were affected — survivors or the murdered — and to the rest of humanity.