The principal purpose of this paper is to analyze the main opportunities and challenges in biomedical research, thus contributing to improving compliance with ethical norms within the context of continuously expanding research, such as to ensure better quality of patient care and reduce the risk of research not observing the totality of patient rights. Since antiquity finding ways to give care to people has represented not only an opportunity, but also a challenge materialized in experimenting and self-experimenting - a constant part of caregivers' activity. Medical research, whether fundamental or applied, is not only essential to evolution in medicine, but also the way towards increasing the quality of individual lives. The article undertakes to analyze the main ethical norms governing medical research, starting from historical experience and literature search. The growing number of people engaged in medical research over the last years has turned bioethics into an increasingly applicative science, capable of developing practical standards to ensure the moral advancement of the medical profession. The bioethics of the last years has been more and more tied to the reality of medical practice, as well as to that of scientific research, contributing increasingly to the integration of moral elements into medical activity and to the development of research in interdisciplinary bioethics. Bioethics and more so bioethical education need to be correlated with the transition from research itself for the purpose of publishing and career advancement to research based on altruism and the desire to contribute to the wellbeing of patients.