Moving from compliance to conscience: why we can and should improve on the ethics of clinical research.

The ethics of clinical research are long-standing; researchers confronted ethical issues long before the implementation of federal oversight and regulations1 and continue to be challenged by the sometimes fuzzy distinctions between ethically acceptable and ethically unacceptable research. New technologies (gene therapy, stem cell transplants, and bioartificial organs, to name a few) raise new ethical issues, but at the same time, so many of the issues that researchers must deal with are recurring. This is a time not only of great opportunity and promise for the pursuit of biomedical research, but also of great responsibility.

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