In this article, the author shares his experience working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and the lessons he learned about institutions and about academic researchers. Among the things he learned at the NIH was the attitude that biomedical scientists sometimes harbor toward their research subjects. Research is a heady mix of intellectual curiosity, self-interested careerism, and an ideology constructed of high-minded ideals: the pursuit of truth, the advancement of knowledge, the good of the many, notions that are not simply catch phrases but entire transcendentalizing discourses. Their usefulness in self-deception and rationalization is both notorious and easily forgotten. A system of independent research review and curtailment is clearly essential when real harm is a possibility. Here, the author discusses the institutional review board (IRB), which has authority to approve, require modification of, or disapprove research subject to a uniform policy or widely known as the "Common Rule."The article further illustrates how the institutional review boards have begun to extend, often inappropriately, their regulation of research and publication into new disciplines and fields. [This article was produced by American Association of University Professors.]