In post-war Britain there was cross-party political pressure to ensure that disabled veterans received fair compensation. This produced a particular challenge to the state’s deployment of psychiatric knowledge. In 1943 new laws governing the pension appeal tribunals were passed to give veterans the benefit of the doubt in their appeals, throwing the spotlight on diseases considered by psychiatrists to have hereditary aetiologies, such as schizophrenia. This paper reconstructs the medico-legal history of schizophrenia appeal cases to better understand both how the pursuit of judicial procedure interacted with medical uncertainty and how post-war sympathies for veterans helped to normalize schizophrenia in public life. Making invalidity fair meant ensuring that the government was held to the standards of legal procedure in its award of war disability pensions. Moreover, in the case of schizophrenia, it also meant using legal means to force the psychiatric profession to be more honest about the limits of its disease theories. The interaction of medical and legal epistemic practices produced a hybrid entity, stress-triggered schizophrenia, as a socially acceptable solution to the problem of medical uncertainty.

This paper examines how practices of validation linked epistemic authority to administrative power, transforming procedures of science into instruments of governance. In the 1880s, US government chemists founded the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) to resolve conflicting fertilizer analyses and secure public authority over commercial chemistry. Through multi-laboratory studies, the AOAC adopted methods that were judged to produce uniform results – a process later known as ‘validation’. In doing so, the AOAC transformed methodological agreement into a foundation for national regulation and helped define analytical chemistry as a trusted instrument of governance. Nearly a century later, in the 1970s, the AOAC attempted to apply similar principles to toxicity testing but failed: most toxicologists resisted standardization, and methodological uniformity did not yield uniform results. Where the AOAC faltered, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) succeeded, convening scientists and regulators across the industrialized world to establish standard methods for evaluating chemical risk. While the AOAC’s original validation system defended public authority against industrial interests, the OECD’s framework reinforced industry centrality by restricting regulatory legitimacy to ‘validated’ studies. Together these cases reveal how validation translated consensus into authority and aligned scientific reliability with political and economic order.

Animal models are essential in preclinical research and widely used in drug development, yet their legitimacy has long been debated. These debates intertwine epistemic, pragmatic, social, and ethical considerations. A key criterion for the legitimacy of an animal model is its validity, which assesses how well it serves as a proxy for human disorders and contributes to treatment development. The forced swim test (FST) is a particularly contested case, as criticism regarding its validity has fuelled controversy over its legitimacy. This article examines how validity arguments and non-epistemic factors have been intertwined to shape the legitimacy of the FST as an animal model in depression research. Although public actors have emphasized non-epistemic concerns, including pragmatic, social, and ethical considerations, such as animal welfare, the article shows how they have also utilized the academic controversy about FST’s validity to argue against its legitimacy for measuring the efficacy of drugs for human depression.

From the 1960s onwards, a growing number of national and international organizations began working to define more precisely what constitutes a carcinogenic exposure. The central question for these new groups of experts soon became what kinds of data authorities should rely on to govern chemicals and their uses. Drawing on new archival material from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, this paper examines the dramatic rise and contested decline of the animal bioassay for carcinogenicity in this domain. The legitimation of this type of study was inseparable from the very emergence of the institutional machinery responsible for controlling carcinogens. During the 1970s and 1980s, establishing the animal bioassay as evidence of carcinogenicity became a way for scientific and regulatory institutions to stabilize relations among themselves. But what had been done could also be undone. The validity of animal studies was challenged on the ground of possible high-dose artefacts in rodents, as well as on that of the emergence of new cellular tests promising to be quicker, cheaper and more precise. These criticisms destabilized the institutional order linked to the animal bioassay standard, even as actors managed to contain the threat – allowing these studies to remain at the core of the field.