School News

Professors Present at 75th Anniversary of Nuremberg Doctors Trial

George Annas and Sondra Crosby, professors of health law, ethics & human rights, spoke in plenary sessions at the sixth international Medicine and Conscience conference in Nuremberg, Germany in October.

This year marks the 75^th anniversary of the Nuremberg Doctors Trial and the Nuremberg Code.

During the Trial, which ran from December 1946 to August 1947, Nazi doctors were charged for their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during World War II, including lethal medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners. To prevent future abuse of research subjects, the court established the “Nuremberg Code,” a 10-point set of legal and ethical principles for human experimentation—the most significant of which requires voluntary, competent, informed, and understanding consent of the research subject. Today, the Code is the most important legacy of the Trial, and is widely recognized as the most significant and authoritative code on the experimentation of human beings in the world.

To commemorate the historic anniversary of the Nuremberg Code, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) held their sixth international Medicine and Conscience conference in Nuremberg, Germany on October 21-23. With over 250 doctors and medical students in attendance, the conference explored historical and present day medical and ethical discussions in the health care system, as well as current challenges surrounding planetary boundaries and the ecological consequences of war and climate change. School of Public Health faculty members George Annas,  William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights, and Sondra Crosby, professor of health law, ethics & human rights, spoke in plenary sessions at the event.

Annas’ presentation centered on the continuing development and understanding of how the Nuremberg Code can be used to address some of the most pressing health care and research concerns of today. A central example is what he termed “type 2 crimes against humanity,” which are defined as human actions that put humanity at risk of extinction, such as proliferation of nuclear weapons, research to make more dangerous bioweapons, continued pollution of the earth, and modification of the human species in ways that threatens genocide.

Crosby’s presentation explored the conditions that allow torture, and medical professionals’ involvement in torture, to take place and examined the distinct parallels between the atrocities exposed during the Doctors Trial and the role United States medical professionals have played in the torture in CIA “Black Sites” and at US military detention centers during the War on Terror. In both instances, Crosby explained, health professionals discarded their ethical obligations to prevent harm and instead became agents of the state. To date, no US health professionals have been held accountable for this torture, although torture continues to be classified, as it was at Nuremberg, as a crime against humanity that is never justified.

“Nuremberg set standards and laid a foundation for how doctors doing research using human beings should behave. I don’t want to lose that,” says Crosby, highlighting the need to formally teach medical students about the Nuremberg Code and its importance, as it is rarely, if ever, discussed in depth. “Medicine is supposed to be a healing profession, yet doctors have used their medical skills to harm, torture, and murder people. We have to do better.”

Annas and Crosby believe that continuing to regularly commemorate the development and application of the Nuremberg Code and its fundamental impact on medical ethics is essential for ensuring the dark history surrounding the Holocaust is not lost.

“The 75^th anniversary is particularly critical because almost everyone who was personally involved in the Doctors Trial is now dead,” says Annas, who also spoke at the Code’s 50^th anniversary conference sponsored by IPPNW in Nuremberg in 1996 with long-time colleague Michael Grodin, emeritus professor of health law, ethics & human rights. “People are losing connections to the Holocaust. The slogan is ‘Never Forget,’ but there are no survivors to remember. It is easy for people who weren’t involved to say these things aren’t important anymore, but we can’t let them forget.”

“This is really a matter of justice, accountability, and prevention,” says Crosby. “Unless we talk about it, try to understand why these things have happened, and put mechanisms in place to prevent them from happening again, history will be doomed to repeat itself.”