Research ethics and the Nuremburg Code

I was reading an article earlier in the year, and ran across the following paragraph: "In 1947, after the Nuremberg trials exposed the full horror of the Nazis’ medical experiments on inmates at concentration camps, a new set of principles for ethical research on humans, known as the Nuremberg Code, had been introduced" (Shackle, 2025). The first half of this sentence I was well aware of, but the second was news to me. It makes perfect sense to create a code in the wake of such inhumanity, and I am glad we did that work. But I was also intrigued as to why I didn't already know about this.

The Nuremburg Code encompasses ten principles, with the first - and perhaps the most important - being "'The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.' The code also sets out other principles: experiments should be for the good of society and carried out by qualified researchers, and [that] the risk should never exceed the potential benefit" (Shackle, 2025).

So I went to have a look at the code principles (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025; Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 2025):  

1. "Voluntary consent of the human subject in the experimentation is absolutely essential."
2. "The results of the study should yield meaningful results that benefit society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and are not random or unnecessary in scope and nature."
3. "Any experimentation should be designed and based on the results of animal experimentation, taking into consideration knowledge of the natural history of the issue under study that the results will justify the completion of the experimentation."
4. "The methods used in the study should be conducted so as to avoid any unnecessary physical or mental suffering and injury to the subject or subjects taking part in the study."
5. "No experimentation should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that disabling injury or death will occur, with the exception being if the experimental scientists conducting the study also serve as subjects in the study."
6. "The degree of risk that subjects of the study undertake should never exceed the risk determined by the humanitarian importance of the issue under study."
7. "All proper preparations should be made and proper facilities provided to protect the subject or subjects of the study against any possibility of injury, disability, or death."
8.  "All experiments should be conducted by persons qualified to do so. Through all stages of the experiment, all possible efforts should be taken to ensure the highest degree of skill and care are maintained."
9. "At any point during the experiment, every human subject should be permitted to bring the experimentation to an end should the subject deem that they have reached the point where continuation of the experiment appears to the subject to no longer be possible."
10. "As the experiment progresses, the scientist in charge must be in a state of mind that, should they deem that the continuation of the experiment could result in injury, disability, or death to the subject, the experiment will be terminated."

I wonder if the reason why this was not adopted is that (a) the judges in the Nuremburg trials did not make a ruling, so none of the allied nations formally adopted the code, and (b) we had won. Perhaps we were so flaming superior that we figured that the Nazis were just awful people, and that the rest of us didn't need such safeguards in our research. The Galahadian our strength is the strength of ten for our hearts are pure type thing (after Tennyson, 1842, p. 174). Yeah, right.

So instead we just experimented on people on the QT - such as feeding women radioactive flat bread in the UK in the late 1960s (Shackle, 2025), and were never held to account for it. Despite the Milgram studies (here), and the Stanford prison experiments (here), it has taken us a long time to learn the lessons of WW2. 

Sam

References:

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2025). Nuremberg Code. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nuremberg-Code

Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum. (2025). The Nuremberg Code. National Institutes of Health. https://history.nih.gov/display/history/Nuremberg+Code

Shackle, S. (2025, February 11). The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/11/the-coventry-experiment-why-were-indian-women-in-britain-given-radioactive-food-without-consent?CMP=longread_email

Tennyson, A. (1842). Poems in two volumes (Vol II). Edward Moxon, Dover Street.