A Love Letter to Clinical Trials

Trials come with a multitude of tribulations. Funding for clinical trials can be elusive. Regulatory hurdles are many. Participants are hard to recruit and sometimes even harder to retain. Protocols can be unwieldy, and trial timelines can stretch endlessly. And even when completed, trials can yield results that defy expectations and challenge interpretation. As former National Institutes of Health Director Donald Fredrickson remarked more than 60 years ago, trials “strain our resources and pati...