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July 2005, Vol 95, No. S1 | American Journal of Public Health S99-S106
© 2005 American Public Health Association
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.044792

PUBLIC HEALTH MATTERS

The Perils of Relying on Interested Parties to Evaluate Scientific Quality

Wendy Wagner, JD, MES

The author is with the University of Texas School of Law, Austin.

Correspondence: Request for reprints should be sent to Wendy Wagner, University of Texas School of Law, 727 East Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78705-3299 (e-mail: wwagner{at}mail.law.utexas.edu).

Recently, there has been a trend in both civil litigation and regulatory law to circumvent the scientific community’s collective judgment on the quality of individual studies with an adversarial process of evaluating scientific quality using interest groups. The Supreme Court’s Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc opinion and two recent "good science" laws passed by Congress adopt an adversarial process informed by affected parties for reviewing and screening scientific quality. These developments are unwise. Both theory and experience instruct that an adversarial, interest group–dominated approach to evaluating scientific quality will lead to the unproductive deconstruction of science, further blur the distinction between policy and scientific judgments, and result in poor decisions because the courts and agencies that preside over these "good science" contests sometimes lack the scientific competency needed to make sound decisions.




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