Ethics committees are not enough

Two major discussions on research ethics emerged in the aftermath of World War 2 (WW2).One of them concerned the outcomes of scientific research.It focused on dangerous knowledge, as exemplified by the atomic bomb.This discussion was largely led by physicists and led to the foundation in 1945 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.The other major ethical discussion concerned unethical research activities, in particular maltreatment of human experimental subjects.This discussion was largely triggered by the revelations of atrocities in the German concentration and extermination camps (Lifton, 1986).The Nuremberg code, which emerged from trials against physicians who performed these murderous experiments, had a considerable influence in the post-war development of codes and regulations intended to ensure voluntariness and safety in human experimentation.(Equally heinous human experiments were performed by the Japanese army, but these crimes were much less discussed and had less impact on the development of research ethics [Harris, 1994].)