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The American authorities were led to think about the need for ethical regulation following scandals in medical research. The principles of this regulation were laid down in 1979 in the Belmont Report, which made recommendations applying to all research involving human subjects – including in the social sciences. The regulation was implemented by decentralised academic ethics committees called Institutional Review Boards, which have come under increasing criticism in recent years. The history of ethics regulations in the United States raises a certain number of issues that are not specific to the American context.