Are Human Tests Ethical?

Abstract

> THE ETHICS of experimenting on humans has been getting almost as much attention as the right and wrong of animal research. U.S. Public Health Association has awarded a grant of approximately $100,000 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston to support an inquiry into the moral and ethical basis for research involving human subjects. Eight medical organizations have now endorsed the ethical principles approved in 1964 in the Declaration of Helsinki by the World Medical Assocation concerning human experimentation. Dr. Henry K. Beecher of the Harvard Medical School has charged in the New England Journal of Medicine that 22 cases of human experiment-ation had been either unethical or questionable; that is, performed without the patients' full knowledge and consent and without promise of benefit. Dr. William H. Stewart, Public Health Service Surgeon General, told the American Federation for Clinical Research last April that one of the pivotal clinical research problems of the day is related to the use of human beings as research subjects. The decision to become a subject for research must be made by the subject, said Dr. Stewart. We may like it or not, but the individual subject and only he, with all his personal whims and superstitions and foibles, can make the important choice. Being as fully informed as possible, he can make the choice for any reason, or for no reason at all. principle involved is the same one that condemns slavery and underlay the judgments at Nuremberg. Prior to the Helsinki Declaration, guidelines for doctors in clinical research were provided chiefly by the ethical tenet to do no harm as stated in the Hippocratic Oath, and in the Nuremberg Code adopted by the Nuremberg Tribunal in the Nazi warcrimes trials. Helsinki statement emphasizes benefit to the patient who is ill.