[From Nuremberg to the ethics committees in human experimentation]

During the Nuremberg trials, the accusation prompted the creation of an ad hoc committee to advise on human experiments carried out on prisoners during wartime in the USA. Precisely a charge that had been brought against Karl Brandt and his colleagues. This committee was the forerunner of the Independent Committees, to which the Declaration of Helsinki assigned a role in analysing the ethics of research projects in humans. From 1980 onwards, in industrialised countries, the legislation regarding clinical trials began to incorporate similar structures, IRBs in the United States of America, Ethics Committees elsewhere, and the ''Committee for the Protection of Persons" in France. However, at that time, in spite of the misleading words, we went from ethics to law, from rules of conduct intended for researchers to legal regulations organising relations between sponsors, investigators and persons participating in biomedical research, which is not the same thing.