Informed Consent

Abstract

Consent has been a central issue in research ethics since the mid-twentieth century. It was the first and longest principle of the Nuremberg Code, which itself is “generally seen as the first authoritative statement of consent requirements in biomedical ethics” (Levine, 2008, p. 170; Manson and O’Neill, 2007, p. 2). The primacy of consent entered US law in 1957 (Katz, 2008, p. 92) and was widely accepted with the first and subsequent versions of the Helsinki Declaration in medical ethics (World Medical Association, 2014). It has subsequently entered research ethics more broadly so that it is now a standard requirement across academia (Economic and Social Research Council, 2019; University of Oxford, 2015). Consent is almost universally required whenever academic or clinical research is carried out on human subjects.