Standard medical malpractice litigation accepts diverse kinds of injury, such as fraud,’O* wrongful death, loss of consortium, and the like. These should, of course, be equally available for research litigation where applicable. The more interesting question is whether special kinds of injuries should be recognized in the research setting. Arguably, existing tort law is inadequate to identify some kinds of injuries that may be especially important in the research setting. After all, so long as courts regard breach of informed consent in research to be simply another instance of informed consent as a medical malpractice tort, they will only recognize the injuries familiar in medical malpractice actions. Medical malpractice ordinarily requires some sort of physical harm to conclude that a remedy is warranted. Many jurisdictions recognize a few non-physical injuries, such as emotional distress, but often even these must be linked to a physical injury or the threat of one.lo5 On this approach, if a duped or ill-informed research subject does not incur physical or standard harms, there is no tort. Yet in research such limits would seem inappropriate. John Moore,’06 duped into David Golde’s lucrative research agenda, did not suffer significant physical harm. Yet he was profoundly wronged. Courts need to recognize that certain kinds of mistreatment in the research context can be injuries in themselves, quite regardless whether they cause further physical or other damage. ?kro potential avenues are of special interest. Intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress, aside from actual or threatened physical harm, is one possibility, particularly where the research enrollee has been duped into the research project. Courts have acknowledged emotional distress damages in research case~’~7 and in some battery cases.108 But they may be prepared to go further. Wrongful birth case law, for instance, supports emotional distress damages for a failure to provide adequate information and choice in research. In Berman v. Allan109 an obstetrician’s failure to inform a pregnant woman about the option of amniocentesis led to the birth of a child with Down’s Syndrome - a child whose birth would have been averted, had the mother been informed in time to terminate her pregnancy. The court denied claims for wrongful life 479 INDEPENDENT and wrongful birth, but accepted an emotional distress claim, tied to a violation of the parents’ autonomy. In failing to inform Mrs. Berman of the availability of amniocentesis, defendants directly deprived her - and, derivatively, her husband - of the option to accept or reject a parental relationship with the child and thus caused them to experience mental and emotional anguish upon their realization that they had given birth to a child afflicted with Down’s Syndrome?lo Arguably, if the decision whether to bring a pregnancy to term is sufficiently important for the deprivation of choice to warrant emotional distress damages, so might be the deprivation of a decision whether to participate in research. In a second avenue, courts would directly embrace dignitary torts in the research context. Even for ordinary medical care, a number of scholars have recommended that serious deficiencies of informed consent be deemed a distinct dignitary tort.”’ Because standard informed consent doctrine limits recovery to cases featuring a physical or other separate injury, it can fail to honor human autonomy in cases where someone’s right to choose has been abused without demonstrable physical damage?I2 A particularly poignant illustration comes from people who are imminently dying, because a requirement of physical injury would be virtually impossible to satisfi. In Heinrich v. Sweet the First Circuit ultimately determined that people with terminal brain cancer had no cause of action for wrongful death when they were allegedly subjected to experimental radiation treatments. After all, there was no evidence that the experiment hastened these patients’ already-imminent death^."^ In cases like this, where the only documentable harm is deprivation of the right to make an informed choice, the denial of a dignitary tort as a separate cause of action effectively precludes recovery - no harm, no foul. There is some evidence that courts might evolve toward dignity torts, at least in the more egregious cases. In one case a surgeon simply ignored his promise to use a specific surgical technique the patient had requested, and state statute required the Louisiana Supreme Court to deny battery. Nevertheless, the court held that [tlhe doctor’s breach of duty caused plaintiff to undergo a medical procedure to which the patient expressly objected and for which the doctor failed to provide adequate information in response to the patient’s request, thereby causing damages to plaintiffs dignity, privacy and emotional well-beingdn this type of case, damages for deprivation of self-determination, insult to personal integrity, invasion of privacy, anxiety, worry and mental distress are actual and compensato ry.... The primary concern in this injury to the personality is vindication of valuable, though intangible, right, the mere invasion ofwhich constitutes harm for which damages are re- ~overable”~~* If such a dignitary tort can be found in ordinary medical care, surely it should be even more readily available in research, where a person seeking help for his illness can