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t m c » p u l s e | a p r i l 2 0 1 7 15 "When they had war crime trials after the war, there was one war crime trial for physicians, and it mostly focused on human subjects research experiments … and they came out with what is called the Nuremberg Code," Rubenfeld said. The Nuremberg Code, established in 1947, states "voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential" to research. Although it addressed the travesties and cruelty of human sub- jects research, it did not address the eugenics policies enacted by Nazis to eliminate Germans deemed genetically inferior. "Nuremberg is a very important place, because it is not only where the Nuremberg trials were held and the code was created after the war," Rubenfeld said. "But it was also a site where some of the biggest Nazi rallies were held and where the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were passed essentially prohibiting all non-Aryans from citizenship." Along with the Nuremberg Code, bioethics courses have been inte- grated into medical school curricula, and researchers like Rubenfeld have dedicated their careers to examining the ethical responsibilities of phy- sicians to their patients and society. In January, many like-minded doc- tors and researchers gathered at the Texas Medical Center for a "Bioethics After the Holocaust" conference— among them, Matthew Wynia, M.D., director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. "The minute you start making appli- cations of something that happened then to anything that is happening now, people will say, 'That's an inappropriate comparison, you're playing the Nazi card.' The research abuse that is hap- pening today is not going to be directly comparable to intentionally infecting two young girls with typhus and when one of them dies, dissecting both to see what the difference is," Wynia said at the conference, citing a well-known Nazi experiment. "That's not happening today, yet we have to figure out a way to learn from that history." Rubenfeld argues that eugenics has been transformed, consciously, by scientists. (continued) Train tracks inside the former Polish concentration camp Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, lead up to the main gate. Credit: Marcus Lindstrom/ iStock