ABSTRACT
Public policies designed to use free market incentives to organize health
care systems are under constant scrutiny, most notably in the United States. There is no better example of both the success and danger of injecting the
profit motive into health care than the system by which new medicines are
developed and tested in humans. On the one hand, reliance on the free
market to develop new drugs has attracted substantial private investment,
which, in turn, has produced significant advances in medicine. On the other
hand, physician-investigators and their research institutions have acquired
unprecedented financial interests in the drug research they conduct on
humans, interests which conflict with their responsibility to protect human subjects from unnecessary risks.
