Public Health Law Map - Beta 5 - Medical and Public Health Law Site

mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that
death or disabling injury will occur, except perhaps, in those experiments where the
experimental physicians also serve as subject.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the
humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect
the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or
death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons.
The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the
experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to
bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where
continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to
terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the
exercise of the good faith, superior skill, and careful judgment required of him, that
a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to
the experimental subject. [Nuremberg Code, Trials of War Criminals before the
Nuremberg Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10.]
b) World Medical Association
It is the mission of the doctor to safeguard the health of the people. His or her
knowledge and conscience are dedicated to the fulfillment of this mission.
The Declaration of Geneva of the World Medical Association binds the doctor with
the words: “The health of my patient will be my first consideration”; and the
International Code of Medical Ethics, which declares that “Any act of advice which
could weaken physical or mental resistance of a human being may be used only in
his interest.”
Because it is essential that the results of laboratory experiments be applied to
human beings to further scientific knowledge and to help suffering humanity, the
World Medical Association has prepared the recommendations in Exhibit 9–1 as a
guide to each doctor in clinical research. It must be stressed that the standards as
drafted are only a guide to physicians all over the world. Doctors are not relieved
from criminal, civil, and ethical responsibilities under the laws of their own
countries.
In the field of clinical research a fundamental distinction must be recognized
between clinical research in which the aim is essentially therapeutic for a patient,
300