The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) began to require informed consent for research involving human subjects in the early 1970s. Until this time the attitude had been that since a simple blood draw for research purposes had no direct effect on the person giving the blood, no consent was necessary. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) had guidelines about human subject research that had been put in place in 1966, requiring informed consent;...
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) began to require informed consent for research involving human subjects in the early 1970s. Until this time the attitude had been that since a simple blood draw for research purposes had no direct effect on the person giving the blood, no consent was necessary. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) had guidelines about human subject research that had been put in place in 1966, requiring informed consent; these were updated in 1971 to define further what "informed consent" meant. Before this, people were frequently not fully informed about the full consequences of what their participation in a study meant. Despite the fact that the Nuremberg Code had been instituted after World War II, once the world became aware of the atrocities committed by Nazi doctors, the attitude appeared to be that the guidelines were directed at war criminals and had no application to medical practices in other places. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks discusses various instances of this in addition to the case of the use of the HeLa cells. The infamous Tuskegee Experiment figures in Rebecca Skloot's book. Black men were used as guinea pigs in a study about syphilis, and not given penicillin even after it was found to be effective in curing the disease. Also discussed in Skloot's book were the Southam trials, in which Chester Southam injected HeLa cells into patients to see if the cells were capable of generating cancer.
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