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As we consider the current status of research ethics and informed consent, it is useful to reflect on the findings recently released in a report of the US Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Although the committee found evidence that researchers took issues of consent and voluntariness into consideration as early as the 1940s and '50s, the practice of carrying out experiments without participants' consent was widespread. Much of the experimentation conducted before the current era of human subjects protections (which began in 1974) was guided by the notion that a higher level of consent was required of healthy subjects than of those who were seriously ill. One physician-researcher interviewed by the committee as part of an oral history project commented with regard to routine medical research in the middle of this century: "All I could say at the end was that these poor people were lying there and we had nothing to offer them and it might have given them some comfort that a lot of people were paying attention to them for this one study. I don't remember ever asking their permission to do it." Things have changed. Today, institutional review boards (IRBs) require a higher level of protection for vulnerable subjects than for healthy people. Yet the substantial number of highly publicized cases of scientific misconduct provide evidence of the need for further improvement in the ethical conduct of research. The committee's report suggested that IRBs and government agencies take the...