Throughout history, children have been subjects of research. A legendary Persian prince is said to have isolated newborn babies from all human speech in hopes of discovering whether language was natural and spontaneous. Queen Caroline of England recruited children from a foundling hospital in order to test Jenner's vaccination on them before it was applied to her own royal progeny. The modern controversy over research with children and the retarded can be traced to events at Willowbrook State Hospital for the Mentally Retarded where, during the 1950s and 1960s, healthy mentally retarded children were infected with mild hepatitis in order to study the natural history of the disease. That research aroused great public controversy and its merits and faults are debated even today. It initiated a discussion within and without the medical profession over whether any invasion or manipulation of the body or person of a nonconsenting subject could ever be ethically justified, apart from expectation of benefit to that subjct.1The prevailing codes of ethics governing the use of human subjects for experimentation are curiously ambivalent about children. The progenitor of these codes, The Code of Nuremberg, if taken literally, would exclude children as subjects, for it requires the voluntary consent of the subject "as absolutely essential," without any provision for proxy consent.1 The World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, on the other hand, states that for nontherapeutic research involving legally incompetent subjects, "the consent of the legal guardian should be procured."3(p277) This position has been adopted by the American Medical Association:
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