 The claim that clinical research should satisfy the norms of clinical medicine has this strong virtue: it provides a clear method to protect individual research participants and reassure the public that they are being so protected. If research participants are treated consistent with their medical interests, we can be reasonably confident that improvements in clinical medicine will not be won at the expense of exploiting them. Most accounts of the ethics of clinical research now recognize the limitations of this approach and search for ways to ensure that research participants are not exposed to excessive risks without assuming that the claims of clinical medicine apply to clinical researchers (Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady 2000; CIOMS 2002). Dismissal of the distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic research thus yields an increase in both conceptual clarity and concern regarding the potential for abuse of research participants.