Yunyun Jiang and Diane Uschner

What can romantic comedies teach us about response adaptive randomization for clinical trials? The answer might be surprising.

In the mid-1940s, the British epidemiologist and statistician A. Bradford Hill was faced with the task of designing a clinical trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of streptomycin to treat pulmonary tuberculosis. The antibiotic had just been synthesized in 1943 and was the only hope for patients stricken by this ravaging, infectious disease, which was causing one in four deaths in the USA. No other active treatment was available at the time.

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