Sawyier Fellow Laura Seger wins Karen M.T. Muskavitch Award

IIT's Sawyier Philosophy Fellow Laura Seger won the prestigious Karen M.T. Muskavitch Award for Graduate Work in Practical Ethics at the 2015 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) Annual Conference for her paper, "The Olivieri Affair: A Story of Negative Results."

The paper abstract reads:

The label “negative” is often applied to experimental results that do not support an investigator’s initial hypothesis—although any undesired result may be termed “negative”—and these results rarely appear in published form outside the field of medicine. In this paper I argue that medical scientists, which I define as physicians and clinical researchers without direct ties to industry, now recognize more than anyone else the importance of negative results because they are driven not just by the epistemic goal to get at the truth. As a community of inquirers they also share the practical value of preventing harm to patients, and there’s a growing awareness in medicine of a direct relationship between the nonpublication of negative results and potential harm. This awareness is due, in part, to community-wide reaction to scandals involving publication bias against, or the outright suppression of, negative medical results. In this paper, I treat the lengthy deferiprone scandal (aka “The Olivieri Affair”) as a case study and describe how certain aspects of the physician-medical industry dynamic have changed in response to it. As a result of this and other similar scandals, which exposed physicians and the medical industry to new levels of financial and criminal risk, physicians no longer trust industry to be honest about the true effect of pharmaceuticals on patients, thus medical scientists are beginning to demand access to all results—including negative results—to properly evaluate their prescribed treatments.