The anaesthesia laboratory of the Harvard Medical School at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Human experimentation since World War II has created some difficult problems with the increasing employment of patients as experimental subjects when it must be apparent that they would not have been available if they had been truly aware of the uses that would be made of them. Evidence is at hand that many of the patients in the examples to follow never had the risk satisfactorily explained to them, and it seems obvious that further hundreds have not known that they were the subjects of an experiment although grave consequences have been suffered as a direct result of experiments described here. There is a belief prevalent in some sophisticated circles that attention to these matters would ‘‘block progress.’’ But, according to Pope Pius X, ‘‘... science is not the highest value to which all other orders of values ... should be subordinated.’’ I am aware that these are troubling charges. They have grown out of troubling practices. They can be documented, as I propose to do, by examples from leading medical schools, university hospitals, private hospitals, governmental military departments (the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force), governmental institutes (the National Institutes of Health), Veterans Administration hospitals and industry. The basis for the charges is broad. At the Brook Lodge Conference on ‘‘Problems and Complexities of Clinical Research’’ I commented that ‘‘what seem to be breaches of ethical conduct in experimentation are by no means rare, but are almost, one fears, universal.’’ I thought it was obvious that I was by ‘‘universal’’ referring to the fact that examples could easily be found in all categories where research in man takes place to any significant extent. Judging by press comments, that was not obvious; hence, this note.