The Nuremberg
Code was created in 1947 in Nuremberg, Germany as a result of the court
trials of nazi doctors accused of conducting non-consensual, deadly and
inhumane experiments on prisoners in concentration camps.
By Leslyn Lewis
At
the end of the trial, 16 people were found guilty and the findings evolved into
a Code that protects human subjects in research, and which has shaped
international human rights law and medical ethics ever since.
The judge’s decision highlighted 10 principles that should govern medical research:
1. The
voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
2. The
results of any experiments should be for the greater good of society.
3. Human
experiment should be based on previous results of animal experimentation.
4. The
experiment should be conducted so as to avoid all unnecessary physical and
mental suffering and injury.
5. No
experiment should be conducted where it is believed to cause death, disability,
or where injury will occur.
6. The
risk should never exceed the benefits of the experiment.
7. Adequate
facilities should be used to protect subjects against even remote possibilities
of injury, disability, or death.
8. The
experiment should be conducted only by a scientifically qualified person.
9. The
human subject should be able to terminate the experiment at any time.
10. The scientist in charge must be prepared
to terminate the experiment at any stage, if continuing is likely to result in
injury, disability, or death to the human subject.
The atrocities that the nazis committed against
Jewish people are unthinkable, and the Code stands as a prohibition
against non-consensual human medical experimentation.
In North America, many people of colour are still
distrusting of new medical experiments because of past government abuses.
The United States which was one of the countries
that supported the Nuremberg Trials, later strayed from the Code.
In fact, the notion prevailed for a long time that
certain races of people and the physically and mentally challenged could be
used for medical experiment.
The children in the Willowbrook Mental Hospital
(1955-1970) were enrolled in a hepatitis experiment.
Doctors felt that they met the terms of the Nuremberg
Code because the parents consented on behalf of the children.
The problem is that many parents were enticed
by better treatment for their kids, and also that they were threatened
that their children wouldn’t receive future treatment if they didn’t participate
in the experiment. Many parents weren’t fully informed, and they were unaware
that their children were being injected with hepatitis.
The Tuskegee experiment on African-American males
lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s. Free clinics were set up for syphilis patients,
with Whites being given treatment while African-Americans were unknowingly
withheld treatment and given placebos. Patients were never told that they
had the fatal disease of syphilis.
In addition, if the patients left the clinic and
found another doctor, the US public health told all other doctors not to treat
these patients because they were an active control group to be studied. If a
doctor treated them their license would be revoked by the US public health
department.
In addition, 40 wives contracted syphilis and 19
children were born to these men in the study. The families won a suit of
approximately 10 million against the US government for this unethical
experiment on the African-American community.
Right here in Canada First Nations were experimented
on by the Department of Pensions and National Health (now Health Canada)
between 1940 and 1950.
The human experiments included 1,300 Indigenous
people across Canada, approximately 1,000 of whom were children. Even when
children were visibly seen as being malnourished and iron and other supplements
were suggested, court documents show that the researchers went to great lengths to keep the children in a
state of suffering to preserve the results of a control group.
The principles emanating from the Nuremberg trials
prevail today.
The human experiment on African-American men, the
experiments on mentally challenged children, and also the Canadian
nutrition experiment on Indigenous people, all of which lasted for decades,
remind us that even in modern times the tenets of informed consent and
voluntary participation in scientific experiments can be easily undermined by
even our modern governments.
Starting with the horrors of Nazi Germany and
recognizing human experiments conducted by the US and Canada, the lawsuits that
emerged decades later are a stark reminder to governmental officials and
scientists that there will always be a reckoning.
Lest we forget those who suffered under these
unconscionable experiments by our failure to defend modern-day abuses of any
human experiment based on coercion: including attempts to entice participants,
failure to give sufficient information to make an informed decision to
participate, deliberately presenting false information on the treatment outcome
to entice enrolment in the clinical trial, threatening punishment through
ultimatums that will interfere with one’s normal livelihood or mobility, or any
other of the 10 principles outlined in the Nuremberg Code.
The wheels of justice may turn slowly, and may often
even seem elusive; but they will always turn in the direction that eventually
exposes the truth. And, when that happens – there will certainly be a reckoning.
The writer Dr Leslyn Lewis is a Canadian lawyer and member of the House of Commons of Canada who is also running to be Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
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