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Internet



There was a mention earlier on the list about a medical
research death due to the research having been done via
internet and not published sources.

There's a feature in the news today about the shutting down of federal
research funds for John Hopkins University due to the death of a
human subject in one of the medical testing programs.

If one reads carefully the report of the investigation (on the
Baltimore Sun website), you learn that before administering
or using the particular drug, they did a search for information
using Yahoo and Google, and PubMed.   Based on those
results, they went ahead ... they did not do a true literature
search which would have shown up the 1953 through 1960s
published articles denoting the problems associated with
using the drug.    The investigative team was
divided as to whether this was a major factor because the
death appears to be an asthmatic reaction in combination
with the particular drug.

However it was a frightening (to me) example of the
mythology of the Internet since I have to deal with people
everyday now who will say "there wasn't anything on the
Internet" or "I couldn't find my high school yearbook on the
internet."

Dean


Dean DeBolt
University Librarian
Special Collections and West Florida Archives
John C. Pace Library
University of West Florida
11000 University Parkway
Pensacola, FL  32514-5750
Tele:  850-474-2213;   Fax:  850-474-3338

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