The Origins and impact of the nuremberg doctors’ trial

The main questions I address are as follows: What were the sources of the ethical concepts that became enshrined in the Nuremberg Code? What immediate or short-term impact did the Trial and the Code have on human subjects research ethics in the USA? Finally, could we envision a set of circumstances in which the Trial might never have occurred? To address the latter question, I will suggest comparisons between the US response to medical war crimes in postwar Germany and Japan. While medical war crimes in Germany were not restricted to unethical experiments on human subjects, I will focus here on that aspect of Nazi medicine, as that discussion is most directly relevant to my list of questions.