By Rob Stein
NPR Morning Edition
Originally posted November 25, 2015
Throughout history, atrocities have been committed in the name of medical research.
Nazi doctors experimented on concentration camp prisoners. American doctors let poor black men with syphilis go untreated in the Tuskegee study. The list goes on.
To protect people participating in medical research, the federal government decades ago put in place strict rules on the conduct of human experiments.
Now the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a major revision of these regulations, known collectively as the Common Rule. It's the first change proposed in nearly a quarter-century.
"We're in a very, very different world than when these regulations were first written," says Dr. Jerry Menikoff, who heads the HHS Office of Human Research Protections. "The goal is to modernize the rules to make sure terrible things don't happen."
The article and audio file are here.
