Human Experimentation: Ethics in the Consent Situation

The coupling of the art of healing with the method of scientific investigation for medical research in human beings causes many profound questions to leap into the minds of those whose consciences have been shaped within democratic and religious institutions. Many medical investigators who have carried out research in human subjects have attempted to describe the professional-ethical conditions under which these questions must be resolved.' A survey of the medical-legal literature and popularly written commentaries on experimental medicine likewise reveals a large number of essays attempting to supply the legal, political, medical, and moral dimensions of the several ways in which humans are presently utilized for research.2 The overriding legal and moral importance of the subject's informed con-