Public Health Classics Laying ethical foundations for clinical.pdfVIP

Public Health Classics This section looks back to some ground-breaking contributions to public health, reproducing them in their original form and adding a commentary on their significance from a modern-day perspective. Jon Harkness, Susan Lederer and Daniel Wikler review the 1966 paper by Henry K. Beecher on ethics and clinical research. The original article is reproduced from The New England Journal of Medicine by permission of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Laying ethical foundations for clinical research Jon Harkness,1 Susan E. Lederer,2 Daniel Wikler3 Progress in international health will require further became professors at other medical schools around research involving human subjects, and this may the world. When Beecher published this paper he had often take place in developing countries. In recent been the world’s foremost figure in anaesthesiology years, human experimentation has been dogged by for almost three decades. Beecher made many controversy. Scientists from industrialized countries, original scientific contributions in his chosen field, where strict ethical standards protect participants in but his research also had broader implications for research and help to win public trust, have been medical science: he developed a number of tech- accused of using double standards in carrying out niques for the quantitative measurement of clinical research in poorer countries that they would not be responses that researchers had previously viewed as permitted to perform at home. largely subjective, including pain, thirst, nausea, and Even as these debates continue in scientific even mood. He was also a pioneer in recognizing the journals and in the popular press, it is worth while to p