How the environment affects research on prenatal drug exposure: the laboratory and the community.

This has been a brief overview of some of the many ways in which the environment in which prenatal drug research is carried out affects the process of research and its outcome. In many ways, this chapter is a review of factors that many people know about but rarely discuss in public. Most scholarly articles present research in this area as though it is a smooth and orderly process not much troubled by environmental constraints. The extent to which research flaws are criticized, even those that are inevitable to the process, discourages frank discussion of these problems that are familiar to most investigators who attempt to conduct clinical research in difficult areas. The purpose of this chapter is to make some of these issues more explicit so that they can be planned for in future work and taken into account when current work is reviewed.