INTRODUCTION: PROBLEMS AND ISSUES

The role of military establishments in human medical research is one of the least understood aspects of the history of medical ethics. Yet, experimentation involving persons in military service, whether as subjects or as officials authorizing these activities, not only carries with it vexing legal and political but ethical issues as well. The U.S. military also has made important and largely unappreciated contributions to the evolution of regulations concerning medical experiments. One of the ironies of this history is that the deliberate avoidance of the use of soldiers as experimental subjects has often led to abuses of vulnerable persons in their place (Moreno 2001). This chapter sketches this complex story, focusing mainly on certain critical events and incidents immediately preceding and during the Cold War. Medical experimentation during World War Ⅱ in Germany and Japan is considered for its influence, in the case of Germany, and relative lack of influence, in the case of Japan, on the United States’ military policies and guidelines that developed during the Cold War period. These policies and guidelines often anticipated advances in medical ethics in the civilian world. In spite of a number of shocking and unacceptable abuses, much of the conversation and conceptual apparatus that later characterized the bioethics movement that began in the 1960s took shape in the context of military medicine.