Human experimentation ethics

Safety, ethical, and legal considerations require that the utmost care be exercised in human experimentation. The risk inherent in this work can be minimized by the proper design of facilities for human exposure to reactive gases, such as ozone and sulfur dioxide, and reactive gas mixtures. Standards for the exposure of humans to such controlled atmospheres should be discussed by national groups and agencies, such as the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health. 

Safety, ethical, and legal considerations require that the utmost care be exercised in human experimentation. The risk inherent in this work can be minimized by taking reasonable precautions while ensuring the satisfactory performance of the study. 

A principal committee of the NHMRC, the Australian Health Ethics Committee (AHEC), provides guidance and support for HRECs in Australia, and is responsible for developing and publishing the National Statement on the Ethical Conduct of Research Involving Humans 1999, which replaced the previous NHMRC Statement on Human Experimentation and Supplementary Notes 1992. ... 

The conduct of the yellow fever experiments was the forerunner of the current practice of informed consent and was cited in the formulation of the Nuremberg Code and in many other discussions about the ethics of human experimentation. 

Out of the Nuremberg trials in 1947 came the Nuremberg Code, the first code to deal specifically with human experimentation. It created ethical guidelines for the conduct of medical research throughout the world. Although many researchers had customarily obtained consent from volunteers in the past, it was the Nuremberg Code that first established the practice formally. The code deals with self-experimentation in Article 5, which states No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects. ... 

Declaration of Helsinki. Code of ethics on human experimentation. Helsinki, Finland, 1964 amended in 1975, 1983, 1989, 1996, 48th General Assembly. 

Among the best known ofthe physicians active in the failed 1848 revolution were Rudolph Virchow and Georg Buchner, who later incorporated ethical and political concerns regarding human experimentation into his drama pieces. For more on the 1848 revolution, see Nipperdey Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 350-55, 527-98. 

Brett, A. Grodin, M. Ethical aspects of human experimentation in health services research. JAMA 1991, 265, 1854-1857. 

Human experimentation is limited by statute and by ethical considerations to studies in which there is no prospect of permanent harm to the volunteers participating in the study. This obviously limits the scope of the results obtained by this route, although it can be employed to detenrane the onset of early symptoms or to determine threshold levels for detection of odors or irritation as a potential warning mechanism. Any experiment of this type must be carefully reviewed by a human subject review committee of the institution or corporate research facility where the research is being contemplated. Any subject of such experimentation must be fuUy informed of any risks or benefits and normally must be given an opportunity to withdraw at any point. However, even with this restriction, many experiments using volunteers have been conducted and significant data have been obtained on symptoms initiated by modest levels of... 

This work is located within the broader literature on the history and ethics of human experimentation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. ... 

Draft Code of Ethics on Human Experimentation , BMJ, 27 October 1962. 

Edelson,EJ., Henry K.BeecherandMauricePappworth Honor in the Development of the Ethics of Human Experimentation , in Twentieth Century Ethics of Human Subject Research Historical Perspectives on Values, Practices and Regulations, edited by V. Roelcke and G. Maio (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag 2004), pp. 219—33. 

Hazelgrove, J., The Old Faith and the New Science The Nuremberg Code and Human Experimentation Ethics in Britain, 1946-73 , Social History of Medicine,... 

Langer, E., Human Experimentation Cancer Studies at Sloan-Kettering Stirr Public Debate on Medical Ethics , Science, 143 (1964), 3606, pp. 551—3. 

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