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Welcome to the science podcast for October 2nd, 2020. I'm Sarah Presby. Each week, we feature the most interesting news and research published in science and the sister journals. First up,

we have investigative journalist

Charles Piller. He talks about his latest story on long-term failures at the FDA to regulate

clinical trial safety and data integrity. We also hear from machine learning researcher

Klaus Robert Mueller about an AI that can beat human experts in the sport of curling. Now we have contributing

correspondent Charles Pillar. He wrote an investigative feature on FDA's serious decline in

protections for patients and for data integrity. Hi, Charlie. Hey, Sarah. I'm not sure everyone knows that FDA has oversight of

clinical trials. What exactly is this agency's role with respect to human trials? The FDA is a

vast agency with many responsibilities, and in this case, it has two elements of control over the quality of clinical trials.

One is whether patients are properly protected during the trials and also whether the data

generated from these trials is reliable.

And in keeping with the important goal of the FDA of approving drugs and

devices that actually were.

But as you found in your investigation, the FDA enforcement has been light-handed, slow-moving,

and secretive. Can you give us some examples that you found of shoddy clinical research

practices, poor record keeping that you came across in your deep dive into this?

...