ABSTRACT
The Central Ethics Committee on Human Research of the Indian Council of Medical Research has put together a set of “Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects”. The Second World War (1939–45) in its aftermath, gave rise to an intense concern about the use of human subjects for medical research as revealed by the shocking details of the trial of German medical practitioners accused of conducting experiments on human subjects without their consent and exposing them to grave risk of death or permanent impairment of their faculties. Research in biomedical and health areas has been subjects of international interaction over the centuries. The human genome project is an international research effort, the goal of which was to determine the location of estimated 40–1,00,000 genes and to sequence the entire human DNA.
