ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with a few of the ethical questions of therapeutic innovation raised by the application of new treatments to sick people. Therapeutic innovation is more accurately viewed as a process or a continuum that moves from animal experiments to clinical trials with terminally ill patients beyond the help of conventional therapies, then to the use of the treatment on less and less critically ill patients. The classificatory aspect of the experiment-therapy dilemma is an issue whose import goes far beyond semantic preciousness or academic hairsplitting. The research physician's attempt to equilibrate his clinical and investigative responsibilities is related to a basic problem: determining how experimental and/or therapeutic a new operation, drag, or other procedure is at a given time in its development and for a given class of sick persons. Research physicians are also professionally motivated to qualify in the eyes of their colleagues as "authentic and acknowledged pioneers" in the fields.
