After World War II, Nuremberg, Germany, was the site of trials of Nazi officials charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trials were landmarks in the development of international law. But one of them has also been applied in peacetime: the “Medical Trial^[1],” which has helped to shape bioethics ever since.

Twenty Nazi physicians and three administrators were tried for committing lethal and torturous...

In 1817, a British physician named James Parkinson published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy^[1], describing for the first time cases of a neurodegenerative disorder now known as Parkinson’s disease. Today, Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease^[2] in the U.S. It affects about 1 million Americans and more than 10 million people worldwide.

The signature shaking in patients with the disease is the...