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10 Stumbling Toward Bioethics: Human Experiments Policy and the Early Cold War Jonathan D. Moreno Despite a burgeoning literature on bioethics and the history of bioethics, little has been written about the relationship between the origins of modern bioethics in the later 1960s and the human-experiment policies and practices of U.S. national security agencies during the preceding decades. A notable exception was the work of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) in 1994–95, which operated under a pair of executive orders to review much previously secret material on government-sponsored experiments involving ionizing radiation and to assess the ethical status of those experiments. Much of the information gathered by ACHRE was also relevant to biological and chemical warfare experiments (ACHRE 1996). In the decade since ACHRE, for which I was a senior staff member, I have attempted to build on that foundation by developing a general account of the history and ethics of human experiments by national security organizations during the Cold War. My principle effort in this regard was Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans (Moreno 2001), as well as a number of papers. As the following discussion will show, that account continues to develop with new revelations about the period. Moreover, following the September 11, 2001, events and the later anthrax attacks, there has been new impetus for human experiments that raise issues reminiscent of the early Cold War era and cannot be understood without that perspective. The present discussion concentrates on what I consider to be the critical period in the development of Cold War human research ethics policies in the national security establishment, 1947 to 1953. The beginning of that time saw the¤rst articulation of the term “informed consent,” and the last year included both the Pentagon’s adoption of the Nuremberg Code and several notable deaths. One of the fatalities, of a young Royal Air Force engineer in a sarin gas experiment, is ¤nally being fully investigated in a London inquest as I write this, and it sheds light on the shadowy cooperation of the Western allies on the human effects of unconventional weapons. ...

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