The Nuremberg doctors' trial: the 60th anniversary

Abstract

Any in-depth reflection on the ethics and regulation of clinical research starts at Nuremberg, 60 years ago. It was then that the nature, limits, constraints, and acceptability of experimentation on human beings were extensively and publicly presented, discussed and challenged. On 6 December 1946, the US Military Tribunal One convened its first session at Nuremberg, in the very same Palace of Justice where the International Military Tribunal has held its sessions a few months earlier (Fig. 1). Twentythree physicians and scientists were accused of war crimes, committed on vulnerable populations and inmates of concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. Together with the euthanasia program, barbaric medical experiments were for the first time extensively documented and made widely known. But after the judgement was read out and sentence pronounced (seven death penalties, eight imprisonments and seven acquittals), an erroneous message seems to have been delivered to the world, or at least to the most concerned arena, medicine and biomedical research: namely, these atrocities were initially seen only as a by-product of Nazi barbarity and murderous madness. As J. Katz said, the Nuremberg code was not deemed relevant to Western physicians/researchers because “It was a good code for barbarians, but an unnecessary one for ordinary physician-scientists.” [1]. And indeed, it took several decades for them – for us – to accept that the experiments performed at Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck and other places were medical experiments, and not only a horrendous succession of mass assassinations. In his opening statement, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, head of the prosecution team, explained “. . . The defendants in the dock are charged with murder, but this is no mere murder trial . . . They did not kill in hot blood, or for personal enrichment. Some of them may be sadists