1950: Two-hundred female prisoners infected with viral hepatitis

1954: Polio vaccine was tested on one million children aged six to nine. In April 1955 the vaccine was deemed “safe and effective” by NIH; the vaccine was hailed as a medical triumph of the 20th century.

1966: NIH Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRR) created Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects calling for the establishment of independent review bodies later known as Institutional Review Boards.

Edward Cohn, MD, a Harvard biochemist injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with beef blood in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy. The antigenic irritants in bovine serum albumin could not be purified away biochemically, dooming the medical utility of the bovine protein for the casualties of war. The rejection of…

1976: National Urban League held a conference on Human Experimentation, announcing: “We don’t want to kill science but we don’t want science to kill, mangle and abuse us.”

On July 12, 1974, President Nixon signed the National Research Act which created a commission whose task was to identify basic underlying ethical principles to be used in conducting biomedical research; and the law required codified regulations to protect human subjects during medical research in the United States. Regulations for…