I was visiting the retina service at the Johns Hopkins hospital in the late 1970's. That week, the coordinator of a multicentered double blind study on laser treatment of diabetic retinopathy on the retina of one eye, using the other eye as a control, looked at the interim data, decided it would be unethical to continue the study, and stopped it. At the time, the practitioners of laser therapy for this condition were sometimes derisively called "cowboys". I returned to Boston before the decision to stop the study had been made public and reported on it at a meeting. I was confronted by a wall of disbelief and even anger. Now this treatment is standard and is used hundreds of thousands times per year. I would not be surprised if the Reduce-It study were stopped in the same way.