Why was the NCBI asking about the Nuremberg code? NIH
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Beyond Nazi War Crimes Experiments: The Voluntary Consent Requirement of the Nuremberg Code at 70
The year 2017 marks both the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Code and the first major revisions of federal research regulations in almost 3 decades.
I suggest that the informed consent provisions of the federal research regulations continue to follow the requirements of the Nuremberg Code. However, modifications are needed to the informed consent (and institutional review board) provisions to make the revised federal regulations more effective in promoting a genuine conversation between the researcher and the research subject.
This conversation must take seriously both the therapeutic illusion and the desire of both the researcher and the research subject not to engage in sharing uncertainty.
The Nuremberg Code set the standard for every subsequent attempt to regulate human experimentation. Its first principle remains, 70 years later, its most important: the requirement of the voluntary, competent, informed, and understanding consent of the human subject. Anniversaries provide an opportunity to reflect and to explore how subsequent events and discussions have affected our understanding of critical documents like the Nuremberg Code. The Code was a product of a war crimes trial, and a summary version of the Code was quickly adopted as an explicit requirement of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1966; it is a norm of customary international law.1 As important as it is to classify human experimentation without consent as a potential war crime and a crime against humanity, it is in the context of domestic civil law and ethics that Nuremberg’s consent requirement has been most influential.
It has been 70 years since the Nuremberg Code was authored, and federal research regulations are, in 2017, receiving their first major revision in almost 30 years. The consent provisions of the revised federal research regulations follow the requirements promulgated by the Nuremberg Code. Of course, research has changed over the past 70 years, and federal regulations reflect changes that the Nuremberg judges did not (and often could not) take into account in drafting the Nuremberg Code.
Changes include procedures to permit children (and other populations incapable of consenting) to be used in research, the public’s increased approval of medical research, as reflected in National Institutes of Health budgets; and new technologies for conducting research, including genomic information technology. Although there are strong arguments for modifications, the consent provisions of the revised regulations can be characterized as a memorial to the Nuremberg Code. Born in a war crimes trial, the Nuremberg Code remains at the center of legal and ethical guidance for all legitimate research involving human beings.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5719679/