Lauren Roberts
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
Lauren Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hello, how are you today?
Look, the short answer is a very, very long time.
One of the first recorded controlled clinical trials was a famous one from Dr James Lint, and this was his scurvy experiment.
Now, you probably know that in the 18th century, sailors on long sea journeys were coming down with scurvy, but no-one quite knew what to do about it.
And then in 1747, Lint took 12 men with scurvy and he divided them up into pairs.
He gave some of them vinegar...
some sea water, some vitriol, some a mix of garlic and mustard seed.
But two men got two oranges and a lemon a day.
And by the end of the week, he showed the oranges and lemons were a cure for scurvy.
I suppose that the easiest way to step through it is the phases of the trials.
Like we've got four different phases.
Before we get to phase one, there's ethics approval.
There's a lot of planning.
There's a lot of lab research that goes into it.
Phase one looks at the safety and dosage in a small group, so about 20 to 40 people.
Phase two tests the safety and efficacy in a large group, so around 100, 500 people.
Phase three confirms the drug kind of works as we expect and then looks for rarer side effects in a group of about 1,000 people or more.
And then phase four, so that's monitoring for long-term effects after it's already been rolled out in a population.
So the gold standard is called a double blind trial.
And in a double blind trial, neither the participants nor the researchers know who's getting a fake treatment or a placebo and who's getting the real one.
Showing 1–20 of 102 · page 1 of 6
Next →