Science on Trial

Science on Trial PDF Author: Marcia Angell
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393316728
Category : Breast implants
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In the early 1990s, sympathetic juries awarded huge damages to women claiming injury from silicone breast implants, leading to a $4.25 billion class-action settlement that still wasn't large enough to cover all the claims. Shockingly, rigorous scientific studies of breast implants have now shown that there is no significant link between breast implants and disease. Why were the courts and the public so certain that breast implants were dangerous when medical researchers were not? The answer to this question reveals important differences in the way science, the law, and the public regard evidence--and not just in the breast implant controversy.

Science on Trial

Science on Trial PDF Author: Marcia Angell
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393316728
Category : Breast implants
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In the early 1990s, sympathetic juries awarded huge damages to women claiming injury from silicone breast implants, leading to a $4.25 billion class-action settlement that still wasn't large enough to cover all the claims. Shockingly, rigorous scientific studies of breast implants have now shown that there is no significant link between breast implants and disease. Why were the courts and the public so certain that breast implants were dangerous when medical researchers were not? The answer to this question reveals important differences in the way science, the law, and the public regard evidence--and not just in the breast implant controversy.

Christian Science on Trial

Christian Science on Trial PDF Author: Rennie B. Schoepflin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801870576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Tracing the movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Schoepflin illuminates its struggle for existence against the efforts of organized American medicine to curtail its activities.".

Education Research On Trial

Education Research On Trial PDF Author: Pamela B. Walters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135856532
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Read the author's commentary for the Teachers College Record here: http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=15915 It is not an exaggeration to say that the field of education has been under attack. Many, particularly in Washington, D.C., have proclaimed the research to be shoddy. They have called for new "scientific" standards for research. Randomized control trials have been promoted. In many of these discussions, the only criterion is making a more rational and scientific approach to education research. Since the federal government plays a leadership role in defining the terms of education debates, this critique is important. It stands to radically reshape research and possibly school priorities in the future. The essays in this book take up this important topic. They offer critical insight into how this debate came to flourish. Some of the authors take issue with core assertions of the debate; other are sympathetic. Taken together, they help to broaden and deepen our understanding of the efforts to revamp the field of education research and, ultimately education. The chapters also discuss the factors that facilitate, and impede, research from having an impact on policy. Teaching and Learning Goals Include: -- helps illuminate the relationship between education research and policy --critically examines key assumptions of federal legislation particularly the call for scientific rigor in the No Child Left Behind Legislation --helps students understand the broader intellectual context of this crisis in education

Summer for the Gods

Summer for the Gods PDF Author: Edward J Larson
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541646029
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century's most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day-in cities and states throughout the country. Edward Larson's classic Summer for the Gods -- winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History -- is the single most authoritative account of this pivotal event. An afterword assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.

Trying Biology

Trying Biology PDF Author: Adam R. Shapiro
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602959X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America. For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as “responses” to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro’s study—particularly as it plays out in one of America’s most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.

Science on Trial

Science on Trial PDF Author: Douglas J. Futuyma
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description


The Poison Trials

The Poison Trials PDF Author: Alisha Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226744858
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

Sharing Clinical Trial Data

Sharing Clinical Trial Data PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309316324
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Data sharing can accelerate new discoveries by avoiding duplicative trials, stimulating new ideas for research, and enabling the maximal scientific knowledge and benefits to be gained from the efforts of clinical trial participants and investigators. At the same time, sharing clinical trial data presents risks, burdens, and challenges. These include the need to protect the privacy and honor the consent of clinical trial participants; safeguard the legitimate economic interests of sponsors; and guard against invalid secondary analyses, which could undermine trust in clinical trials or otherwise harm public health. Sharing Clinical Trial Data presents activities and strategies for the responsible sharing of clinical trial data. With the goal of increasing scientific knowledge to lead to better therapies for patients, this book identifies guiding principles and makes recommendations to maximize the benefits and minimize risks. This report offers guidance on the types of clinical trial data available at different points in the process, the points in the process at which each type of data should be shared, methods for sharing data, what groups should have access to data, and future knowledge and infrastructure needs. Responsible sharing of clinical trial data will allow other investigators to replicate published findings and carry out additional analyses, strengthen the evidence base for regulatory and clinical decisions, and increase the scientific knowledge gained from investments by the funders of clinical trials. The recommendations of Sharing Clinical Trial Data will be useful both now and well into the future as improved sharing of data leads to a stronger evidence base for treatment. This book will be of interest to stakeholders across the spectrum of research-from funders, to researchers, to journals, to physicians, and ultimately, to patients.

The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials

The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030918651X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Randomized clinical trials are the primary tool for evaluating new medical interventions. Randomization provides for a fair comparison between treatment and control groups, balancing out, on average, distributions of known and unknown factors among the participants. Unfortunately, these studies often lack a substantial percentage of data. This missing data reduces the benefit provided by the randomization and introduces potential biases in the comparison of the treatment groups. Missing data can arise for a variety of reasons, including the inability or unwillingness of participants to meet appointments for evaluation. And in some studies, some or all of data collection ceases when participants discontinue study treatment. Existing guidelines for the design and conduct of clinical trials, and the analysis of the resulting data, provide only limited advice on how to handle missing data. Thus, approaches to the analysis of data with an appreciable amount of missing values tend to be ad hoc and variable. The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials concludes that a more principled approach to design and analysis in the presence of missing data is both needed and possible. Such an approach needs to focus on two critical elements: (1) careful design and conduct to limit the amount and impact of missing data and (2) analysis that makes full use of information on all randomized participants and is based on careful attention to the assumptions about the nature of the missing data underlying estimates of treatment effects. In addition to the highest priority recommendations, the book offers more detailed recommendations on the conduct of clinical trials and techniques for analysis of trial data.

The Impact of Scientific Evidence on the Criminal Trial

The Impact of Scientific Evidence on the Criminal Trial PDF Author: Oriola Sallavaci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317910907
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book explores challenges posed by the use of DNA evidence to the traditional features, procedures and principles of the criminal trial. It examines the limitations of existing theories of criminal trial processes in the face of increasing use of scientific evidence in the court room. The research elucidates the interconnections at trial of three epistemologies, namely legal reasoning, as represented by counsel and trial judge, common sense manifested by the jury and scientific reasoning expounded by the expert witness. Sallavaci argues that while scientific reasoning is part of this hybrid of trial languages and practices, its extended use is producing specifically novel tensions which impact on the traditional criminal trial landscape. Through the lens of DNA evidence, the book investigates how far the use of scientific evidence in the fact finding process poses challenges for the adversarial character of the proceedings and rules of evidence; how it affects the role of the judge, jury and expert witness, as well as the principle of orality and continuity of the trial. In comparing the challenges faced in English common law trials to those of the USA, this book has international scope, and will be of great use and interest to students and researchers of Criminal Law and Practice, Policing, and the role of Forensics in Law.