Research ethics--a brief historical review to 1965

Abstract

Most discussions on modern research ethics--particularly the formation of research ethics committees (institutional review boards)--focus on the revelations of the dreadful practices in the Nazi concentration camps at the Nuremberg trial after the second world war, with the subsequent production of the Nuremberg and Helsinki Codes. In fact, however, these trials were not pivotal: there was a long history of such concerns, going back at least to the 1830s, when William Beaumont introduced a contract with his patient Alexis St Martin, as well as the later part of the century when the celebrated leprosy worker Hansen was prosecuted in Bergen for having experimented on a patient without her consent, losing his post as a result. Probably, had it not been for the entry of the USA into the First World War, public indignation at the growing number of reports of unethical experimentation in public hospitals would have resulted in regulations, while official codes were introduced in Prussia at the turn of the century and in Berlin again in 1931. Nevertheless, the impetus for modern developments came principally from the furore aroused by the proselytising of two physicians: Henry Beecher, an anesthesiologist at Harvard, and Maurice Pappworth in London, whose respective books Experimentation in Man and Human Guinea Pigs, documented case histories of egregiously less than ethical research practices that went largely unquestioned by other clinical research workers. Here I shall discuss the reactions to and influence of some of these episodes, as well as more recent developments.