Is your comment suggesting that some trial sites will not engage...

Is your comment suggesting that some trial sites will not engage with the 50:50 randomised dosage split, but instead to some other ratio?

My comment is suggesting what I believe I have suggested if not stated elsewhere already which is that management (ie. Kilian and Jolanta perhaps with the approval of the board or perhaps without) MAY BE deliberately not stating what the control to test split is on public records like clinical trials dot gov because they want to preserve the wiggle room to change that split back to 40 patients to test arm and only 20 to control arm (which is what I believe - strongly - I recall hearing Ross say on one of those dopey alternate media cameos he gave).

Here is the actual concern I have - its about competence not dishonesty or anything else about the CYP management and board to do a well designed trial. Its about the competence of doctors and professionals to give good advice to patients considering going into trials - because the patience won't in most cases have enough science to understand what the difference is between different trial offerings and when they are given choices will largely trust (in my opinion they will trust badly and unfortunately the doctors and professionals that are advising them - because the doctors and professionals advising them will probably not be objective or impartial they will probably be ethically compromised and intellectually challenged.

If a patient can sign up for a 20 to 40 split that means that have a two to one chance of getting the treatment arm versus the control arm. The control arm is the unlucky break. They shouldn't want that. They should accept that that can happen - it needs to happen for good science to happen.

Change the trial design to 30 to 30 split (30 is 50% of 60 - the total patients to be recruited count) and the same patient has now twice as much chance of getting the treatment arm BUT the results are less likely to be statistically resilient to confounding and so the total 60 patient set may not produce as rigorous a proof that the independent variable (the cyp cells) and only the cyp cells are the difference between the cyp treatment arm and the control (steroids plus placebo) arm.

Its about who is trusted and about how humans will act in circumstances where most of them don't understand by all of them have interests and some of them have conflicting interests.

Professor Joanne Kurtzberg is likely a very personable person and a qualified scientists and probably really cares about her patients - and she has probably done (in my opinion) great HARM to the cause of good science with her sentimentality and poor science despite having good science qualifications. She has given vulnerable people a palatable choice AT THE PRICE of SLOWING down good research and good science. I think it extremely likely people like Joanne Kurtzberg will result in more children dying because she believed when she did not have the data to rationally believe and so should not have favored her subjective belief.

Kurtzberg the professional, the scientist, has been a pest. And it doesn't much matter that she meant well and probably genuinely believed she was doing the right thing. It matters that she put a bunch of dodgy science into the record and impeded good science from being done by doing that.