Some bioethicists link the beginnings of our field to the Nazi Medical experiments and the Nuremberg Trial (Annas). Whether this is the beginning of bioethics is debatable, but without a doubt, research ethics has been a central topic in the field. In fact, the very first federal bioethics commission laid out the principles of research ethics in the Belmont Report. Later, the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research recommended to the President and Congress that a uniform framework and set of regulations should govern human subjects research. This effort reached fruition under The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects or the “Common Rule” that was issued in 1991. Since then, there have been no major changes to the regulations – until now. After a five-year process and thousands of comments, the new “final rule” was released on January 19^th, 2017. The July 2017 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics addresses these changes. In addition to our usual open peer commentaries, we are posting a number of blog posts written in response to the AJOB target article.

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