Collaborative Tests

Abstract

Collaborative tests are more usual in the measurement of biological response—bioassay of drugs, vitamins, plant stimulants, insecticides, cosmetics, flavours, preferences and other imponderables generally—than in the physical sciences, which are optimistically credited with being somehow above such things. This feeling of the infallibility of instrumentation is the laboratory equivalent of another social stratum’s blind belief in the newspaper: ‘If it’s in print it must be right.’ It is only when people begin to disagree over results that a call is made for a test on a wider scale than is possible in one laboratory, involving several different instruments in different laboratories, all testing the same material or method. Understandably, such inter-laboratory tests almost always show substantially greater divergences than intra-laboratory tests (made on different instruments within one laboratory). A psycho-ergonomic study of this difference in behaviour might be rewarding.

Quot homines, tot sententiae

Terence Phormio II iv 14