ABSTRACT
Since 1976, the Hastings Center has recognized outstanding work in bioethics with an honor called the Henry Knowles Beecher Award. Beecher was a Harvard anesthesiologist who became famous for his article, “Ethics and Clinical Research,” which was published in 1966 in the New England Journal of Medicine (Beecher 1966). In that article, Beecher called out his medical colleagues for the mistreatment of human subjects in medical research. The article was not a polemic, or even an editorial opinion. It was a document of wrongdoing. Proceeding in a dispassionate, clinical style, Beecher simply laid out case after case in which medical researchers had violated the rights and trust of their subjects, exposing them to the risk of serious, lasting injury.
