"Ethics and Clinical Research" Revisited

The doctrine of informed consent, borrowed from the law of torts, cannot be readily transplanted into therapeutic settings. The broader, as yet unrealized, idea of informed consent, which suggests that parties must make decisions jointly, should guide interactions between physicians and patients or investigators and subjects. I want to pay tribute to Henry Knowles Beecher by reflecting upon the ethics of human experimentation, past and present. He, and I somewhat later, became absorbed in this topic years prior to the flowering of bioethics. By