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Asked by Jake to Aislinn, Fiona, Nathan, Padraic, Sinead on 3 Feb 2015.
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Sinead Quirke answered on 3 Feb 2015:
Before a drug is tested on person a lot of studying and testing has been done and cross checking or quality control by differs managers. The engineers and doctors need to understand the theory of how it will act before they give someone to trial. If things went wrong then the person who trailed the drug or their family would sue the drug company to get compensation. Drug companies employ lots of lawyers to protect them and make sure the people taking part in the trial know the risks. The companies also have big insurance policies to protect them.
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Nathan Quinlan answered on 3 Feb 2015:
In all fields of engineering where health or lives can be affected (buildings, aeroplanes, drugs, medical devices and so on) there are a lot of regulations and safeguards to ensure that the design is safe before it goes near the public.
In more mundane jobs, when lives are not at risk, engineers are very conscientious and careful, and generally want to do the best job they can. They work in teams, check each other’s work, make constant efforts to do their job better. If an engineer is negligent or careless of course s/he will be in trouble. But ordinary mistakes are not a big deal – engineers make mistakes all the time, like all humans, but the mistakes get caught by the system, everybody learns a bit, and there’s no shame in it.
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Aislinn Coghlan answered on 3 Feb 2015:
Hopefully it wouldn’t even get that far if it was dangerous to patients. In a clinical trial, if anyone starts to get bad side effects it would be pulled from use immediately.
The law changed in recent years to hold the engineer in charge personally responsible if the process they own hurts anyone. This means that if an engineer was running a process and something went wrong, they could be sent to prison.
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