[6] He established five district-level peripheral centres for prevention and early detection and a pain relief and palliative care network with Morphine availability for terminal cancer patients.
[6] He implemented a 10-Year Action Plan in Kerala which reduced tobacco consumption, improved early detection, enhanced therapy facilities, and provided palliative care and pain relief to substantial sections of dying cancer patients.
Between November 1999 and February 2000, while Dr. M. Krishnan Nair was serving as the director, the RCC in association with the Johns Hopkins University conducted a series of drug trials on 26 patients.
(see external links): "AFTER a four-month-long inquiry, the US-based Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has stated what was already quite obvious: that the controversial experiments at the Regional Cancer Centre (RCC) in Thiruvananthapuram were the first human trials of the potentially anti-cancer chemicals developed at the Hopkins Biology Laboratory; that those chemicals had not been properly tested in animals before they were tried out on patients at the RCC; that the Biology Professor who conducted the experiments was not qualified or authorised to do experiments involving human subjects; that she did not have the mandatory approvals from the university's institutional review boards authorised to make ethical clearances; that she did not have the US government's approval to export the chemicals used in the trial to India; that the clinical trial conducted at the RCC did not meet the standards for research with human subjects; and that adequate and proper consent was not obtained from the patients before they were made part of the experiments.
A statement issued by the JHU Office of News and Information said (significantly, without naming the Biology Professor concerned, Dr. Ru Chih Huang) that "one of its scientists" tested experimental cancer drugs on patients in India "without required federal or university approvals and without adequate preliminary tests in animals".
However Dr. Krishnan Nair, as the Director of the Institute in India, denied the ethical misconduct even after the report came from Johns Hopkins.
The Indian Government as well as the Institute (RCC) never admitted any wrongdoing even after the media repeatedly exposed the pain and sufferings of patients who participated in the study.