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LABORATORY-ENDORSED THERAPEUTIC AGENTSMATHEMATICAL CALCULATION OF THEIR PROBABLE CLINICAL VALUE, ILLUSTRATED BY THE PROBABILITY COEFFICIENT FOR COMMERCIAL BACTERIOPHAGE
W. H. MANWARING, M.D.;
A. P. KRUEGER, M.D.
J Am Med Assoc. 1929;93(2):95-96.
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The experimental laboratory stands as the first buffer between suggested curative agents and their clinical application. A hundred instinctive "hunches" may be tested in order that three or four may be endorsed for clinical trial. Any therapeutic agent thus endorsed, however, now faces a second buffer, a mathematical law of clinical probability. For many suggested agents the mathematical probability for or against clinical success is readily calculated.
CALCULATED PROBABILITY WITH VACCINES AND ANTISERUMS
Three decades of clinical experience with laboratory-endorsed vaccines and antiserums give ample data from which to calculate the probability coefficient for this class of therapeutic agents. Hundreds of theoretically logical, laboratory-endorsed vaccines and antiserums have been tried by clinicians; 95 per cent of them have been thrown into the clinical discard.
An impartial mathematician would conclude from this that our fundamental immunologic theories and current experimental laboratory methods assay less than 5 per cent clinically verifiable truth.
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
Author Affiliations
Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine; Instructor in Bacteriology, Stanford University School of Medicine; Associate (Elect) in General Physiology, Rockefeller Institute STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIF.
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