David Rothman (medical historian)

Rothman co-chaired two task forces. The recommendations of these task forces were published in 2006 in the Journal of the American Medical Association under the title Health Industry Practices that Create Conflicts of Interest: A Policy Proposal for Academic Medical Centers.

Together with the Open Society Foundations, Rothman convened a task force to address physician involvement in detention, interrogation, and torture. A resulting report entitled Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror was published in November 2013.

In an article titled "The Shame of Medical Research" that was published in November 2000, Rothman wrote:

Until the 1990s American medical researchers performed most of their experiments on other Americans—frequently choosing subjects who were poor and vulnerable. Now, however, they are increasingly likely to conduct their investigations in third world countries on subjects who are even poorer and more vulnerable. Part of the reason is AIDS—the first modern infectious disease to strike the developed and developing world simultaneously and to give both a large stake in finding a cure. Part of the reason, too, is the mounting financial and regulatory burdens of research in the rich nations, which cause investigators, both from universities and drug companies, to go to the poorer countries to test new treatments.

Whatever the reason, practice has overwhelmed ethics. The major international codes on human experimentation, including the principles proclaimed at Nuremberg in 1947 and the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki in 1964, all say that the well-being of the subject always should take precedence over the needs of science or the interests of society, and that doctors must obtain "the subject's freely informed consent." But neither these codes nor the Western groups concerned with medical ethics have had the developing countries in mind. Countries in which clinical trials are now conducted are often too poor to pay for the medicines that are successfully tested. And the people recruited for those trials very seldom get the kind of medical care the participants in trials in prosperous countries can expect. Whether Western principles covering the treatment of people who are the subjects of research can and should be applied in Africa and Asia has become a bitterly debated question.