A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE USE OF HUMAN SUBJECTS IN MEDICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES

The doctrine of informed consent for human experimentation was promulgated in the Nuremberg code in 1946 after the discovery of brutal experiments carried out by the Nazis. It was refined in the Helsinki declarations issued by the World Medical Association in 1962 with subsequent revisions in 1964, 1975, and 1989.

The requirement of informed consent now applies to behavioral research as well as medical research. Many of the classic experiments in psychology involve deception and even clear harm to the subject and would not be allowed today.

The informed consent standard was only gradually adopted in the United States, however, and it took some shocking cases in this country to demonstrate the need for reform. In 1966, a well-respected clinician and investigator, Henry Beecher, had published an article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, in which he reported common but unethical treatment of human research subjects in many premier institutions in the United States. Subsequently, the NIH developed the first Public Health Service Policy on the Protection of Human Subjects. At first these had only limited application. Later they were expanded to apply to all human subjects research conducted or supported by what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.