Prospective registration of health care research would help

EDITOR,--Stephen Lock urges Britain to abandon its lax approach to scientific fraud and to establish national mechanisms to reassure the public that the activities of the research community can, when necessary, be audited.1 We agree and suggest that a national health register is a fundamental pre-requisite for addressing this problem. Internationally, there has been increasing acknowledgment that controlled trials should be registered at their inception to facilitate participation in them; to prevent unknowing duplication; and to make it easier to identify …