The Nuremberg Code is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation created as a result of the subsequent Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War (Jacobs, 2020). The Nazi doctors' trial convinced the world that there need to be specific regulations in place to protect vulnerable people from unethical medical experiments. The Nuremberg Code was a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation set as a result of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War. The trial was of 23 leading German doctors and administrators who had been involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity as part of the Nazi regime, including conducting lethal human experimentation on prisoners. The Code is an important landmark document in the history of bioethics. The Code established ten basic ethical principles that apply to all medical research involving human subjects. The principles require voluntary consent from research subjects, so that they have full knowledge about what will happen to them, and can withdraw or stop at any time. It also requires that researchers should avoid doing unnecessary harm to patients and that the benefits to society should outweigh any harm done.

a). The first principle of the Nuremberg Code states that The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that a person who is participating in a research study must be subjected to no harm (Annas, 2018). And, he or she must have given informed consent. The Nazi doctors' treatment of prisoners was abhorrent because they did not follow this rule. Prisoners were subjected to experiments without their knowledge or consent. And, the experiments inflicted harm upon them that ranged from physical injury to death. In fact, many prisoners were killed in order to harvest organs for later study. This type of behavior is not only unethical; it is also illegal today in most countries.

b). The Nuremberg code states that subjects may only undertake risks if the benefits exceed the risks by a wide margin. For example, in the realm of clinical research, human subjects may only take on minimal risk (Jacobs, 2020). The concept of minimal risk has been widely adopted by the research community and its oversight committees. The idea is that if a subject takes on no more risk than would be encountered in everyday life then the risk can be considered minimal. This is a very liberal standard, and it allows for most types of research to be conducted on human subjects. For example, a researcher conducting a study that involves collecting blood samples from one hundred healthy volunteers would likely receive IRB approval to proceed. In this case, the researcher is asking his or her subjects to take on the minimal risk because blood draws are a routine procedure that is performed on healthy people all the time. The IRB would see this as an acceptable level of risk for this type of study.

c). The types of experiments that should never be conducted are any experiment that involves knowingly causing the infliction of physical pain, torture, or the deliberate malnutrition of an individual that is to be conducted for research purposes (Jacobs, 2020). Additionally, any experiment that would expose an individual to a disease or potentially fatal condition without their consent and in order to conduct research is prohibited.