1966: Animal Welfare Act establishes ethical use of laboratory animals in research. There is no law protecting human research subjects from unethical experimentation.

1966: Henry Beecher’s article “Ethics and Clinical Research” in New England Journal of Medicine identified 50 unethical clinical studies. But it would be eight years before a federal law would set ethical standards for human experimentation. Beecher’s article had been rejected by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Read about Beecher’s unethical collaboration with the CIA. *