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Prof. Annas argued that American bioethics was born at the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg (1946-47), at which American lawyers and physicians worked together to prosecute Nazi physicians and scientists for war crimes and crimes against humanity, crimes often committed under the guise of medical experimentation necessitated by national security. The trial court's formulation of the Nuremberg Code, with its absolute requirement of informed consent, is usually presented as the trial's major medical ethics and human rights law accomplishment.
But the real legacy of the Doctors' Trial is deeper, and includes the beginnings of a convergence of human rights and bioethics at practice levels both above (international human rights law) and below (individual and professional ethics) the level of the sovereign state and its national laws. The bioethics and human rights legacy of Nuremberg includes not only rules about human experimentation, but also rules about physician's role in executions, interrogations, and torture.
On the 60th anniversary of the Doctors' Trial, Prof. Annas asked again, with Elie Wiesel, "how is it possible?" and again addressed the question of why torture is so attractive to humans and whether doctors and lawyers, working together as they did at Nuremberg, but with the advantage of a 60-year legacy, including the Geneva Conventions and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, can prevent at least some war crimes and crimes against humanity by taking medical ethics—and human rights laws—seriously.
Read the related article from the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology.
The Deinard Memorial Lecture on Law & Medicine is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Joint Degree Program in Law, Health & the Life Sciences and the Center for Bioethics.
Support for the series comes from the law firm of Leonard Street and Deinard and the Deinard family.