About one third of all medical studies in the United States involving children never end up being put to use because scientists frequently don’t publish the results of their work. 19 percent of the studies that recruited children didn’t run to completion because researchers weren’t able to recruit as many volunteers as they needed to run the experiments. And of the 455 trials that were completed, the results from 30 percent weren’t published.

If you don’t publish failed trials it is quite possible that other researchers wiil waste time re-doing the same trials, to no effect. The problem is ending up with scientific literature that only shows all the things that do work, but not the measures that do not.

Parents volunteer their children for these studies with an understanding that their efforts are contributing to the advancement of medical science. They frequently don’t learn the results of the experiments involving their children. It’s time – and hope – wasted. Even if the research has come to nothing at least one knows.

Scientists have many explanations for this situation. Maybe the results don’t show what the investigator wants and they move on. More often they are busy and don’t focus enough time and attention on getting those results out.

I personally would consider this an ethical lapse. When you do a clinical study and you’re asking patients to participate and subject themselves to a risk, in order to inform science and generate knowledge, you have an ethical obligation to broadcast those results to the wider scientific community. (Adapted from the NPR website)