Nuremberg Code

The Nuremberg Code is a set of 10 principles intended to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concerns involving the use of any human subjects in research. An American military tribunal issued the Nuremberg Code in 1947 as part of the judgment in the so-called Doctors’ Trial, part of the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II. Some of the Nazi doctors and administrators prosecuted in the Doctors’ Trial were involved in medical research on concentration camp prisoners.

The code, a set of voluntary guidelines, was written to apply to medical experimentation involving human subjects and focuses on the physical and mental safety of the human subjects. Many of the following principles, which are paraphrased from the code, can apply to other forms of research:

• 1.
  Voluntary-informed ...