ABSTRACT
For a good understanding of the drug testing culture in the 1960s in Britain it is important to realize that there was no national system for controls regulating the testing of potential remedies. Neither the Dangerous Drug Act 1951 nor the Therapeutic Substances Act 1956 provided a regulatory context for the testing of medicinal substances in human subjects. And there were no ethical committees to sanction (or otherwise) experiments on human volunteers or formal rules on how to carry out a clinical trial. 2 The control over testing of new pharmaceutical substances for toxicity was left to the good sense of the researchers and pharmaceutical companies involved.
