Something to bear in mind when an employer says you have to take an experimental drug to keep your job.

The Nuremberg Code (German: Nürnberger Kodex) is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation created by the USA v Brandt court as one result of the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War. In a review written on the 50th anniversary of the Brandt verdict, Katz writes that “a careful reading of the judgment suggests that” the authors wrote the Kodex “for the practice of human experimentation whenever it is being conducted.”[1]

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.

The Kodex has not been officially accepted as law by any nation or as official ethics guidelines by any association. In fact, the Kodex’s reference to Hippocratic duty to the individual patient and the need to provide information was not initially favored by the American Medical Association.[13]

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