Non-Consenting Adults

Sixty-five years ago in Nuremberg, Germany, American prosecutors confronted the Nazi physicians who had subjected Jews and others to a murderous regime of medical research. The "doctors' trial" was the first of the war crimes trials; one of its outcomes was the famous Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines for human experimentation.

The first tenet of the code is very clear: "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential."

Today, the Nuremberg Code is the most important influence on U.S. law governing human medical research. Even so, marginalized groups have frequently been coerced into studies that violate their right to consent. A recent review of the bioethics of human research in the U.S. offers little prospect for change.

My book Medical Apartheid documents many cases. In 1994, for example, the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston was accused of enrolling poor black women into narcotic-treatment research without their knowledge. The next year in Los Angeles, an experimental measles vaccine was tested on children, mostly black and Hispanic, without their parents' consent. In 1994 and 1995...