UK plans tougher rules on clinical trial transparency

"A paper published in The Lancet in 2009 estimated that up to 85 per cent of biomedical and health research may be wasted because it asks the wrong question, is badly designed, is not published or is poorly reported." How does research like this get ethics approval? A decade ago, when I had a role in approving (social services') particpation in research, we explicitly rejected research that appeared to have a high risk, through any of the reasons mentioned here, of coming to conclusions that could mislead policy makers and bring about misallocation of resources, or waste time of staff who joined in. This was a far greater danger than the possibility of someone feeling uncomfortable half way through and not being told they could withdraw, which was the kind of thing most would-be researchers spent their efforts trying to reassure us about. So let's rejoice if those approving research start considering the harm it might do beyond that to immediate participants.