Moral issues facing intermediaries between creators and the public

: Intermediaries, those persons and organizations that play supportive and gatekeeping roles between the creative individual and the public, are frequently called upon to maintain moral standards. Two real‐life examples are presented. In the first, professional societies still have not taken a stand on the transactions between ethnobotanists and persons in third world countries from whose knowledge they profit. In the second, the moral stand taken by the New England Journal of Medicine in refusing to publish the Nazi hypothermia research is discussed.