Human guinea pigs and the ethics of experimentation: the BMJ's correspondent at the Nuremberg medical trial

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Abstract
Confidential evaluation of human experiments The first trial of major German war criminals at Nuremberg was an international military tribunal of the four allies, Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. By contrast, the medical trial was constituted solely as a United States military tribunal, organised and paid for by the United States. Behind the scenes, however, there was considerable liaison between British army and United States medical war crimes investigators. British medical authority was represented by the forensic pathologists Professor Sydney Smith and Major Keith Mant. At a meeting with French and United States counterparts at the Hoechst pharmaceutical offices in May 1946 these investigators assembled crucial evidence on German medical atrocities. The British handed over a group of German medical captives for trial, and in November 1946 Major Mant briefed the United States prosecution's medical expert, the neurologist and Austrian emigre Professor Leo Alexander.2 3 The British came round to the view that medical scientists were best qualified to evaluate human experiments as an expert tribunal in closed session. Thus whereas the trial made German medical research publicly accountable to international justice, the British plumped for confidential evaluation by professional peers. View larger version: In this window In a new window Fig 1 Professor Leo Alexander explains the results of German medical experimentation on a Polish student, Jadwiga Dzido, carried out at Ravensbruck concentration camp

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