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Subversive Subjects: Rule-Breaking and Deception in Clinical Trials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Rebecca Dresser
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Extract

Scientific reports about clinical research appear objective and straightforward. They describe a study's findings, methods, subject population, number of subjects, and contribution to existing knowledge. The overall picture is pristine: the research team establishes the requirements of study participation and subjects conform to these requirements. Readers are left with the impression that everything was done correctly, by the book.

In other places, however, one finds a different and messier picture of clinical research. In this picture, research subjects deviate from the prescribed plan. One author contrasted the “tidy graphics” and “crisp prose” of the New England Journal of Medicine's HIV/AIDS trial publications with reports that subjects shared medications and broke other trial rules. Awareness of this behavior, he wrote, could lead insiders to “conclude that knowledge was resting on something rather less solid than bedrock.”

Type
Independent
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Winter 2013 , pp. 829 - 840
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2013

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