Sixteen years earlier, on August 20, 1947, a U.S.-led war tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, had sentenced seven Nazi doctors to death by hanging. Their crime was conducting unthinkable research on Jews without consent—sewing siblings together to create Siamese twins, dissecting people alive to study organ function. The tribunal set forth a ten-point code of ethics now known as the Nuremberg Code, which was to govern all human experimentation worldwide. The first line in that code says, “The voluntary consent of the human
