The statement of a moral rule is generally simple and straight-forward. For example, one such rule is "Don't Injure." But to see how this rule is applied requires us to think carefully about how particular sorts of injuries are linked up with certain sorts of relationships between professionals and clients. In particular contexts we, as clients, invest professionals with hope and trust beyond the ordinary. And in any case where hope and trust are embedded deeply in the relationship, the obligation not to hurt assumes a new dimension: "Do Not Undermine Hope!" and "Do Not Betray Trust"

The special group of professionals whose work involves experiments in the actual or possible applications of very new technologies to very grave illnesses or injuries is inevitably involved in problems of just that kind. Here too the vulnerability of the client population is heightened by a significant factor: the strength of even an irrational hope if one has been in despair, in some cases for years. Our outrage about quacks who offer nostrums billed as "curing" old age or impotence or cancer testifies to our deep feeling that professionals are under an added obligation whenever evocation of such hopes in such a population is an almost unavoidable part of the professional-client interaction. This added moral burden is intensified in our time inasmuch as there is such a tendency to invest new technologies with the magic and mysterious miracles formerly attributed to gods.

In what follows, two very different problems facing researchers in this field are recounted by the scientists personally involved in them. The serious reflections by these scientists are then commented on by a philosopher who specializes in medical ethics.

This issue of PERSPECTIVES offers also a summary and analysis of the recent conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Profession and concerned with the uses of property controls, of various types, in the worlds of science and technology: thus broadly, in "intellectual property." The author of this review article shows some of the broad-ranging effects of any decisions in these matters and thus shows how each such policy decision has significant social and moral presuppositions and implications.