1973: Final Report of Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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…

1950s: Dr. Henry K Beecher, chief anesthetist at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, an outspoken advocate of the Nuremberg Code; who authored a seminal article in the NEJM (1966), was a secret paid CIA consultant who participated in secret, CIA- and US Navy-sponsored experiments aimed at perfecting interrogation (i.e. torture) techniques…

Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted the first of a series of “Obedience to Authority” experiments shortly after the trial of Adolph Eichman, the Nazi criminal tried in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity. Eichman’s defense was, not guilty, claiming that he had merely followed orders. Milgram sought to learn the…

In 1942, psychiatrists debated legalizing murder (“euthanasia”) at the American Psychiatric Association. Foster Kennedy, MD, advocated killing “feebleminded” “defective” children whom he called “Nature’s mistakes” “hopeless ones who should never have been born.” (Jay Joseph. The Missing Gene… 2006) He opposed euthanasia for normal, but severely ill adults. Dr. Leo…

1967: British physician Maurice Pappworth published Human Guinea Pigs: Experimentation on Man; he was far less circumspect than Beecher. He identified researchers by name and provided their institutional affiliations, stating bluntly: “No doctor, however great his capacity or original his ideas, has the right to choose martyrs for science or…

In 1978–1981, the CDC conducted a hepatitis B vaccine experiment on homosexual men living in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. HIV/AIDS was first detected among the participants in the CDC hepatitis B vaccine trial and quickly spread throughout the gay community in those cities. A body of…