Code of Nuremberg

The Code of Nuremberg is a document establishing an international deontology on the human experimentation. It is a direct consequence of the Procès of Nuremberg at the end of the Second world war and constitutes an answer to the medical experiments Nazis carried out on the man.

It should be recalled that in the post-war period, two courts were constituted:

one judged the political officials and soldiers, and created the concept of Crime against humanity
the other judged the doctors, and was described as military tribunal because it was chaired by an English soldier.

In August 1947, the judges return their verdict in what one called “the Procès of the doctors” where appear 23 marked implied in the medical Expérimentation Nazi including 20 doctors and three official Nazis (Rudolf Brandt, Viktor Brack and Wolfram Sievers). The judges define in this occasion what is tolerable as regards human medical experimentation. Indeed, several defendants had asserted that their experiments presented only little difference with those which had been practiced before the war and which no law traced a limit between what was legal and what was not it.

In April of this same year 1947, Doctor Léo Alexander had subjected to the defining council for the war crimes six points what concerned the legal medical research. The verdict of the lawsuit took again these principles and added four other points to them. These ten joined together points form the Code Nuremberg which defines the “basic principles which should be observed to satisfy the moral concepts, ethical and legal concerning, inter alia, the research undertaken on human subjects”.

The ten points establish that:

the voluntary assent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
the experiment must have practical results for the good of the company and is impossible to obtain by other means.
the human experimentation should be considered only after one experimentation on the animal.
the experiment must be practiced in order to avoid any suffering nonnecessary.
the experiment should not be tried when there exists a reason a priori to believe that it will involve the death or the disability of the subject.
the incurred risks should never exceed the humane importance of the problem which the experiment considered must solve.
one must draw aside from the experimental subject any possibility likely to cause wounds or death.
the experiments should be practiced only by qualified people.
the human subject must be free to make stop the experiment, and this, any time.
the experimentative scientists must be free to make stop the experiment if they judge that their wellbeing or that of their (S) prone (S) is in danger.

The contribution of the Code of Nuremberg

the basic rule of the experimentation on the human subjects becomes the free and enlightened assent subject.
importance of the concept of degrees of risk close which one estimates vis-a-vis the humane importance.
Before the war, which preceded in the texts was the scientific requirement (Claude Bernard), from now on it is the voluntary assent of the subject.

The Code of Nuremberg east at the base of the current Bioethics.

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