ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence of the Nuremberg Code in American jurisprudence and public policy. It outlines the events that led to the Code’s creation and examines the principles that comprise the Code. The chapter provides a decade by decade account of the last fifty years of the Nuremberg Code’s regulatory, legislative, and judicial life in America. It focuses on the history of the Code and finishes with a discussion of its future. Ethics Codes regulating research involving human subjects may serve several purposes. Codes may articulate idealistic aspirations as well as express fundamental values, such as respect for persons or scientific integrity. New scientific optimism shaped the application of the Nuremberg Code in the 1950s. The circumstances of the birth of the Code had a profound effect upon how it has been viewed ever since. Some of the Nuremberg Trial’s defendants were ultimately accepted into American science.
