Biomedical Research
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In recent years there has been increasing concern in the literature regarding the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects in biomedical, behavioral, and social science research. The initial concern seems to have developed with reference to biomedical research, perhaps because potential damage to the subjects is more clear-cut. The issue was raised after World War II at the Nuremburg trials because of Nazi experimentation on human subjects. The Hippocratic Oath requires first that physicians do no harm, but there is ample evidence that medical doctors have carried out risky and at times fatal research on human subjects without their consent or even their awareness in settings more normal than the Nazi concentration camps (Katz 281-291). It was outrage at the Nazi experiments, however, experiments performed on defenseless political and war prisoners, that led to the Nuremburg trials and that made explicit for the first time in the Nuremburg Code the ethical principles for biomedical research on human beings. This code also formed the basis for the Declaration of Helsinki adopted by the World Medical Association in 1964 and the "Ethical Guidelines for Clinical Investigation" adopted by the American Medical Association in 1966 (Bower and de Gasparis, 3). In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of ethically questionable research designs came under public scrutiny, raising the issue of ethics for all types of research. The most infamous of these studi
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irect medical killing, or killing arranged within medical channels and carried out by doctors. The programs was called "euthanasia," a term that camouflaged mass murder. The Nazis justified their actions on the concept of "life unworthy of life," which applied to true euthanasia might mean that the quality of life is so poor that medical killing is justified. The Nazis carried out their principle of "life unworthy of life" in five steps, or stages in the acceptance of ideas of killing: 1) coercive sterilization; 2) the killing of "impaired" children in hospitals; 3) the killing of "impaired" adults, most from mental hospitals; 4) the extension of this policy to "impaired" inmates of concentration and extermination camps; and 5) mass killings in the extermination camps themselves (Lifton 21).
There was a mixture of pseudo-medical attitudes with political ones in the way the Nazis shaped these policies, as Lifton indicates when he notes:
Sterilization policies were always associated with the therapeutic and regenerative principles of the biomedical vision: with the "purification of the national body" and the "eradication of morbid hereditary dispositions." Sterilization was considered part of "negative eugenics". . . (Lifton
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Approximate Word count = 2544
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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