FROM THE EDITOR

Medical Research, an ambitious plan to delineate the agency’s priorities and to serve as a guide for scientific research in the coming years [1]. Central to this plan is the promotion of clinical and translational research. Since then, the NIH has shifted more extramural funding to these areas and added funding for didactic-degree programs in clinical research at academic institutions around the country to train the next generation of clinical researchers. As part of recent economic stimulus efforts, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will infuse the NIH with hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it slated for clinical-research endeavors [2]. Opportunities in clinical research abound for medical students and residents. And as the focus of the leading scientific agency in the country shifts more toward research involving human subjects, there is little doubt that increasing conflicts between the agenda of scientific advancement and biomedical ethics will surface. This issue of Virtual Mentor explores a number of these aspects of clinical research. The three clinical cases in this issue describe scenarios that are particularly salient for medical trainees engaged in clinical research. In the first case, Julie Freischla