Biomedical researchers in the United States were genuinely stunned last week to learn that the federal government was suspending the clinical research programmes at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, the largest academic medical centre in the country, and one of the most revered.

The suspension announced by the fledgling Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) was condemned in unusually forthright terms by JHU researchers and administrators, who clearly felt that the government had overreached itself. Dispensing with the usual pleasantries, the university went on the offensive, publicly condemning what it regards as the OHRP's rushed judgement.

Both sides are now backing off somewhat (see page 363). Government spokesmen are explaining, rather meekly, that trials will be allowed to continue if it is clearly in patients' interests that they do so. Johns Hopkins has negotiated an action plan that will satisfy the OHRP's concerns and allow the suspension to be gradually lifted.

However, the charges being made against JHU's system for the internal review of clinical research protocols are not trivial. It has been widely noted over the past several years that the institutional review boards (IRBs) that do this job across the United States are badly over-stretched. It is surprising, to put it mildly, that JHU obtained approval for the non-therapeutic administration to healthy volunteers of an asthma-inducing agent whose toxicity could have been verified by a simple Medline search. And it is salutary that the death of one of those volunteers, 24-year-old laboratory technician Ellen Roche, was first made public through the good offices of The Baltimore Sun, rather than through official channels.

Clinical researchers confront illness and death every day and are understandably impatient with bureaucratic requirements imposed by agencies such as the OHRP to cater for sometimes-hypothetical public concerns. The work of the researchers is indeed too valuable to halt. But if the threat of such a suspension at an establishment of Johns Hopkins' standing helps to dispel complacency about IRB reform — and forces the medical schools and the Congress to stop passing the buck and decide who should pay for a properly resourced IRB system — then it will have served a useful purpose.