Curtis Meinert, PhD
Born:
Curtis Meinert is a pioneer clinical trialist, involved with the earliest major, multicenter trials (University Group Diabetes Program (UGDP) and the Coronary Drug Project (CDP)). He established the journal “Controlled Clinical Trials” and wrote the definitive text Clinical Trials: Design, Conduct and Analysis, and established a major trial center at Johns Hopkins University.
Meinert is a native of rural, farm-country Minnesota, got his PhD in statistics at the University of Minnesota, and went on to head one of the early clinical trial coordinating centers at the University of Maryland, where he coordinated an early secondary prevention trial in coronary disease, the CDP.
His research is largely in randomized clinical trials of AIDS, cardiovascular diseases, and asthma. His contributions to clinical trial design and operation were early and seminal, and they continue to the present as he analyzes policy and practices of this central medical methodology, including the shut-down of trials by external forces such as Institutional Review Boards and the OHRP.
His editorials, often provocatively titled, are among his more piercing and valued contributions. (HB)
Sources
Meinert, C.L. 1998. ‘Masked monitoring in clinical trials – Blind stupidity?’ New England Journal of Medicine, 338(19), pp. 1381-1382.
Meinert, C.L. 1998. ‘IRBs and randomized clinical trials’. IRB, 20(2-3), pp. 9-11.
Meinert, C.L. 1998. ‘Clinical trials and treatment effects monitoring’. Controlled Clinical Trials, 19, pp. 515-522.
Meinert, C.L. and Gilpin, A.K. 2001. ‘Estimation of gender bias in clinical trials’. Statistics in Medicine, 20, pp. 1153-1164.