REVIEWING ETHICAL STANDARDS IN CONTEXT 
VI 
Medical Tribunal considered charges against 23 physicians and bureaucrats 
accused of complicity in concentration camp experiments, many of which 
were geared to support the Third Reich’s war effort. 680 A key witness for the 
prosecution was Dr. Andrew C. Ivy, a leading U.S. medical researcher who 
served as a vice president at the University of Illinois and as former scien- 
tific director of the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. 
Dr. Ivy was a consultant designated by the American Medical Association 
to assist the prosecutors. 681 Around the time the trial began in 1946, Dr. Ivy 
prepared a report to articulate ethical and legal conventions, or “rules,” for 
human experimentation. Historians have argued that the preparation of this 
report was prompted by the Nazis’ defense lawyers’ surprisingly disconcerting 
arguments regarding questionable conduct of human research in the United 
States, particularly research conducted in prisons. 682 
The American Medical Association accepted the report of Dr. Ivy and his 
collaborator, Dr. Leo Alexander, and its House of Delegates adopted it in 
December 1946. The Journal of the American Medical Association published 
the statement in early January 1947. 683 The rules emphasized voluntary and 
informed consent, as well as avoidance of inappropriate risk. First: 
“Consent of the human subject must be obtained. All subjects 
must have been volunteers in the absence of coercion in any 
form. Before volunteering the subjects have been informed of the 
hazards, if any. . .” 684 
And, second: 
“The experiment must be conducted. . .so as to avoid all unnecessary 
physical and mental suffering and injury, and... there is no a priori 
reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur, except 
in such experiments as those on Yellow Fever where the experi- 
menters serve as subjects along with non-scientific personnel.” 685 
In May 1947, Dr. Ivy, describing his assessment of the Nazi doctors’ medical 
experiments in the newsletter of the Federation of State Medical Boards, 
concluded that the activities “were crimes because they were performed on 
prisoners without their consent and in complete disregard for their human 
rights. They were not conducted so as to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering, 
99 
