ABSTRACT
In the fifty years since the issuance of the Nuremberg Code, the ethics of human experimentation has assumed such centrality in social thought and public policy that it requires an act of imagination to recall just how novel this event was. Nuremberg represented the first attempt to set forth and enforce an explicit set of principles, literally a code, in the conduct of human experimentation. At the trial of the Nazi doctors, defense attorneys claimed that before World War Two the ethics of human experimentation were undeveloped, both in the United States and Germany. The modern history of the ethics of human experimentation begins with Claude Bernard's 1865 book, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. The marked disparity between the principles of research ethics and the reality of laboratory practices prior to the issuance of the Nuremberg Code confirms the import of promulgating a formal code.
