Clinical Chemistry Podcast

Maintaining high ethical standards is a characteristic we expect in many professionals, but perhaps most in the field of medicine.  Although biomedical ethics is a relatively new field, there have been discussions of moral issues in medicine since ancient times.  The Hippocratic Oath, for instance, was written by Hippocrates at approximately 400 B.C.  It requires that a new physician swear to uphold specific ethical standards.  Over 2000 years later new physicians still swear by the Hippocratic or a similar oath. The December 2019 issue of Clinical Chemistry published a Review paper that provides a broad overview of ethics as it pertains to laboratory medicine.

Science is not just based on interesting findings.  One of the key elements in research reports is an informative description of the methods that were used to develop the experiment, to collect the data, and to analyze them.  Since this process rests on replication, reporting of methods is essential as it allows others to stage a similar experiment, to design an identical study, and to evaluate whether the findings can be replicated.  If they cannot be reproduced, the outcomes from the previous experiment or trial will gradually or immediately lose credibility.   A recent editorial on this topic appeared in the December 2019 issue of Clinical Chemistry.