Advancing Medical Research

In the genteel game of croquet, the goal is deceptively straightforward: to hit your ball through a series of hoops before your opponent does. However, anyone who has picked up a mallet knows the sport can get downright cutthroat. A strong player with the right strategy can hit her opponent’s ball so far away that it essentially knocks him out of the game.

That’s similar to what scientists are starting to…

Making cells in the lab may not sound too dramatic, but under the microscope, what scientists call cell-line development can be even more competitive than the most cutthroat reality-show contests.

In a New Yorker article about how evolutionary psychology findings are usually based on surveys of undergraduates, Anthony Gottlieb wrote, “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens.” 

Biomedical research can suffer from a similar bias: Subjects don’t always represent the full range of patients in terms of gender, race and ethnicity. But why is it…

With a growing emphasis on patient-reported outcomes, study volunteers are becoming active participants in evaluating a treatment’s efficacy. Since the first reported controlled clinical trial in 1747, when Scottish surgeon James Lind studied how eating oranges and lemons can cure scurvy among sailors at sea, patients have always been essential to expanding medical knowledge and developing new therapies. After all…

When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently gave a presentation on diversity in clinical trials, Dr. Ricardo Rojo wasn’t surprised to hear that — at least for medicines where gender is not overtly relevant — research participants today are predominantly white men.