(Nature) – By the time science-fiction writer Daniel Keyes died in 2014 at the age of 86, he had lived through vast upheavals in biomedical science, from the discovery of the DNA double helix to the sequencing of the human genome. But ethical oversight did not always keep pace. Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon, 50 years old this year, highlights how often the need for oversight is ignored or flouted.