During the course of the last century, a number of historical instances of unethical human research have occurred, and risen to the forefront of the social imagination. The atrocities of the European and Pacific Holocausts, the tragic 1932-1972 United States Public Health Service Syphilis Studies at Tuskegee, concomitant with the 1946-48 unethical public health human research in Guatemala loom large. These high profile instances join with the Cold War pediatric experiments and other cases to draw the attention of culture to clear patterns of serious ethical deficiencies and regulatory non-compliance. The facts surrounding these historical events highlight the serious danger of moral objectification of human subjects in research. These cases carve in high relief the absolute necessity of one of the most critical areas of research administrator service, namely the ethical oversight of research involving human subjects. This article will explore the contemporary national concern over human subject protections, provide a brief synopsis of illustrative problematic cases, proceed to a reflection from a philosophical perspective upon the problem of moral objectification, and then further define the role research administrators should assume in assisting their institutions to learn a new grammar of service, namely an ethical "language" and perspective that transcends an all too elementary sense of regulatory compliance.