Ethics and Clinical Research
Henry K. Beecher, M.D.†
N Engl J Med 1966; 274:1354-1360June 16, 1966DOI: 10.1056/NEJM196606162742405
Share:
This article has no abstract; the first 100 words appear below.
HUMAN experimentation since World War II has created some difficult problems with the increasing employment of patients as experimental subjects when it must be apparent that they would not have been available if they had been truly aware of the uses that would be made of them. Evidence is at hand that many of the patients in the examples to follow never had the risk satisfactorily explained to them, and it seems obvious that further hundreds have not known that they were the subjects of an experiment although grave consequences have been suffered as a direct result of experiments described . . .
*From the Anaesthesia Laboratory of the Harvard Medical School at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
‡At the Brook Lodge Conference on "Problems and Complexities of Clinical Research" I commented that "what seem to be breaches of ethical conduct in experimentation are by no means rare, bul are almost, one fears, universal." I thought it was obvious that I was by "universal" referring to the fact that examples could easily be found in all categories where research in man takes place to any significant extent. Judging by press comments, that was not obvious; hence, this note.