Q. Witness, do you not believe that your ideal attitude here is more or less that of a single person standing against the body of public opinion?
A. No I do not. That is why I read out the principles of medical ethics yesterday, and that is why the American Medical Association has agreed essentially to those principles. That is why the principles, the ethical principles for the use of human beings in medical experiments, have been quite uniform throughout the world in the past.
Q. Then you do not believe that the urgency, the necessity of this city would make a revision of this attitude necessary?
A. No, not if they were in danger of killing people in the course of testing out the new drug or remedy. There is no justification in killing five people in order to save the lives of five hundred.
Q. Then you are of the opinion that the life of the one prisoner must be preserved even if the whole city perishes?
A. In order to maintain intact the method of doing good, yes.
Q. From the point of view of the politician, do you consider it good if he allows the city to perish in the interests of preserving this principle and preserving the life of the one prisoner?
A. The politician, unless he knows medicine and medical ethics, has no reason to make a decision on that point.
Q. But as a politician he must make a decision about what is to happen. Shall he coerce the doctor to carry out the experiment, or shall he protect the doctor from the rage of the multitude?
A. You can’t answer that question. I should say this, that there is no state of no politician under the sun that could force me to perform a medical experiment which I thought was morally unjustified.