Bioethics experts Paul Weindling and Volker Roelcke suggest that current bioethical thinking may use an incomplete picture of the historical context of the Nuremberg code. Volker Roelcke writes: “rather than being the result of a coercive state, Nazi medicine illustrates how medical researchers and their representative bodies […] co-operated with and even manipulated a totalitarian state and political system relying on expert opinion, in order to gain resources for the conduct of research without any moral and legal regulation.” He states that Nazi doctors “followed the intrinsic logic of their scientific disciplines and used the legally and ethically unrestricted access to human beings created by the context of the political system and the conditions of war.”4 By centring exclusively on the war crimes and not on their broader context, the judges at Nuremberg issued the code in order solely to set the boundaries for “permissible experiments” and tackle the difficult question of the biomedical research conducted on human subjects outside Germany during the war. The court thus failed to produce a broader legal doctrine protecting individuals against harm induced by scientific practices at large, including not only human beings as subjects of medical experiments but also as consumers and beneficiaries of science’s outcomes.
Toms Blog on Life and Livingness