Paul Root Wolpe is arguing with the late and distinguished Hans Jonas, who in 1969 wrote that medical experimentation came with its own rules of the game. That was the case because those who let themselves be experimented on are doing something "holy," because sacralized altruism is at issue. That is, they are so eager to see advances in medicine that they let potentially terrible things happen to their bodies.

If and when and insofar as such altruism may on occasion be a motive for permitting such experimentation, such rules of the game might be acceptable. And Paul Wolpe pictures "us," whoever we may be as we play that game or cheer it on, "convincing ourselves that experimentation is voluntary, that it is an act of altruism, a sacred self-sacrifice." Then comes a knowing and informative line: "The problem is that we also know that this is not so."

It seems to me that one of the first and main tasks of the medical ethicist is to tell the truth. In this case, the truth may be not about victims and agents but about those of us who take reassurance when we should not and those who promote causes as if under illusion when we have no reason to be beguiled. There are plenty of research studies out there to show that most patients participate for the sake of their own person. They are inspired by hope, or wishing, or the urge to play the medical lottery as a part of their desperate desire to be relieved of pain, to live. Those are worthy enough motives, but a whole string of justifications that Hans Jonas would want us to use and that we might want to adduce, comes apart when altruism is not the engine behind their actions.

Dr. Wolpe and others in this issue are defending integrity, the dignity of the human person, the sacred dimension of bodily existence. Sit down with religious thinkers across the spectrum and look for consensus. They cannot agree on God, or which God, or how God acts, since some religions do not begin or end with God-experience, God-language. But they all do speak up for that dignity, that sacrality. And if they do so, and mean it, they will find themselves engaging in prophetic examination of existing experimentation practices and then in efforts to change them or end them.

Trained as I am to think theologically—though I am also equipped to think economically, medically, civilly, and more, as aren't we all?—I cannot read discussion of these human-experiment topics without seeing them rich in theological implications. We have talked already of the need for truth-telling. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made devotion to that the keystone of his ethics. We have read of bodily integrity, human dignity and freedom, all of them themes rich in theological contexts.

There is also practical work to do when one looks at the side-effects of human experimentation gone astray. I am a friend of R. Stephen Warner, who is usually calm and cool and collected. But at a Christmas season concert last year, one conducted by his spouse, as I was trying to compliment the chorus and urge him to pass on word of congratulations to the director, I found him distracted, agitated. Why? For the reasons he outlines in his argument here. This I learned after having quietly asked how his work was going. It was going nowhere.

Warner was an innocent social scientist bystander who had a couple of years of his work in survey research blocked, postponed, effectively interrupted. This left him with nothing to say to support his scholarship, scholarship of a sort that leads to human betterment.

Professor Warner might think that I risk trivializing his work by casting his problem, one occasioned by administrative ineptness and bureaucratic bungling, next to the desperate cases about which others wrote in respect to bodily integrity.

All these issues, however, do connect. They are part of a continuum. They are all linked to endeavors to find out more about the human story, always with an interest in informing and helping responsible people make decisions.

It would not be out of place for other readers than I, let me contend, to rise after reading an issue like this and make new resolves: in pursuit of integrity, truth-telling, and care for the human—whether as victim, patient, or scientific inquirer.

Medical ethics is still a relatively young discipline; organizational ethics is also emerging now; religious or theological ethics is an old emphasis, but it is challenged and refreshed when those who devote themselves to it encounter new problems, stand on new horizons, as they must when new forms of human bodily experimentation present themselves to our eyes and consciences.