Nuremberg and the issue of wartime experiments on US prisoners. The Green Committee
J. M. Harkness
Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA. jmh17@cornell.edu.
Defense attorneys at the Nuremberg Medical Trial argued that no ethical
difference existed between experiments in Nazi concentration camps and
research in US prisons. Investigations that had taken place in an Illinois
prison became an early focus of this argument. Andrew C. Ivy, MD, whom the
American Medical Association had selected as a consultant to the Nuremberg
prosecutors, responded to courtroom criticism of research in his home state
by encouraging the Illinois governor to establish a committee to evaluate
prison research. The governor named a committee and accepted Ivy's offer to
chair the panel. Late in the trial, Ivy testified--drawing on the authority
of this committee--that research on US prisoners was ethically ideal.
However, the governor's committee had never met. After the trial's
conclusion, the committee report was published in JAMA, where it became a
source of support for experimentation on prisoners.
