Dr. Louis Lasagna, 80; Called for Clinical Tests of New Drugs

Dr. Louis Lasagna, 80, who led a crusade calling for the clinical testing of drugs before their approval and rewrote the Hippocratic Oath recited by graduating doctors, died of lymphoma Thursday in a hospital in Newton, Mass.

Lasagna, a native of Queens, N.Y., who served as dean of Tufts University’s Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences for two decades, was best known for his work in clinical pharmacology.

His 1954 article in the American Journal of Medicine, based on his research, showed that taking a pill without any active medicine in it can have a placebo effect. Lasagna played a key role in prompting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1962 to require controlled clinical studies before a drug could be sold.

In 1964, Lasagna wrote an alternative to the Hippocratic Oath that focuses on a doctor’s responsibility to stress prevention over cure, to ask for help when needed and to bear in mind the psychological aspects of disease.

“Above all, I must not play at God,” the new oath says. “I will remember I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being.”