ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how biomedical research actors deal with experimental failures that occur in clinical trials. It distinguishes between two types of failure: failure of the drugs being tested and failure of the trials themselves. While the first type of failure leads to negative results that demonstrate the ineffectiveness of a treatment, the second type of failure leads to uninterpretable results due to a lack of rigour in the organisation of patients included in studies and patient follow-up. Drawing on a body of work in the sociology of science and medicine, this chapter attempts to explain the unequal attention paid to these two types of failure. It also addresses the issue of selective publication of clinical trial results.
