1. 12. My colleague Michael Grodin and I followed up our conference on the 50th anniversary of the Nuremberg Code at the Holocaust Memorial Museum by founding our own physician NGO – but combining it with lawyers as well: Global Lawyers and Physicians. See for details.
2. 9. A rewriting of the intellectual history of American bioethics is beyond the scope of this essay, but my guess is that virtually anywhere one begins to dig in American bioethics, one will end with World War II. The best known examples are from two of the fields intellectual founders: Jay Katz and Hans Jonas. Both were born in Germany and had family members killed in the Holocaust, and the bioethics-related writings of both grew out of their reflections on the war and the concentration camps. Jay Katz, for example, published what is still the leading text on human experimentation in 1972 (Experimentation with Human Beings [New York: Russell Sage, 1972]), and the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial was central to this collection of primary sources. His star student, and assistant in this project, Alex Capron, went on to be a leader in American bioethics himself, and I don’t think it’s an accident (although he may) that he is currently the ethicist for one of the major “health and human rights” organizations in the world, the World Health Organization. Jay Katz himself was a member of two major U.S. bioethics panels that examined scandals: the Tuskegee Study Panel in 1972, and the President’s Advisory Council of Human Radiation Experiments (1994–95). The Nuremberg Code was the centerpiece of the latter report – although attempts to distance bioethics from it continued. See supra note 7. Hans Jonas was, of course, extremely prolific. His bioethics was also much broader than just medicine, but included the entire biosphere. Nonetheless, it was grounded in the Holocaust and the dehumanization of Auschwitz, where his mother was murdered. It is no accident that his own star pupil is now the head of America’s bioethics council, Leon Kass.