[Physicist]

safety and efficacy of which had not been *established* according to the stricter standards of the physicist's metier rather than the more lax rules-of-thumb typically applied by the benighted bureaucrats of the Food and Drug Administration?

I don't believe there should be a Food and Drug Administration. They are as likely to reject a good practice or drug or device as to accept a bad one, thanks in part to weak scientific publication standards. But the greatest failures of public policy caused by weak research happen not in the administrative branch of government, but in the judicial: witness the recent Vioxx judgment.

[aposiopetic]

I don't believe there should be a Food and Drug Administration.

Our friends the regulators are a product of the infinitely malleable Commerce Clause, it seems.

They are as likely to reject a good practice or drug or device as to accept a bad one, thanks in part to weak scientific publication standards.

Neither rules nor the Agency's statutory mandate requires FDA reviewers to place any particular weight on published, as opposed to unpublished, data. But reviewers can (read *must*) be swayed by investigators' reputations or by their personal acquaintance with them.

But the greatest failures of public policy caused by weak research happen not in the administrative branch of government, but in the judicial: witness the recent Vioxx judgment.

I tend to agree.