Q12 - Public health will improve

[WaltGrace1983]

This is a great question in my opinion with a lot to learn! This question is asking for a necessary assumption.

New medical information will allow people to use that information to improve health
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Peer-review process is unavoidably slow
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If medical researchers stop waiting until their findings are published in peer-reviewed journals before informing the press of important results, then public health will improve more quickly from new discoveries

There is a lot going on here and trying to make the core as precise as possible may eliminate some important thinking going on so I apologize but the details of this core really are relevant. There are a few, albeit small, gaps in this argument. This is not one where we can easily pre-phrase the answer, select it, and move on. This will require a bit of thinking. Here are some things I noticed with this stimulus:

(1) The conclusion is talking about how the public health will improve more quickly. Notice how this is on the weaker side; it is not saying that public health will improve quickly - but more quickly. The distinction is important.

(2) There is a slight gap between reporting to the press or publishing the information in journals and using the information. Maybe it need not be that the press knows about the information or that the journals publish it. I mention this because the argument seems to hint on a reliance to tell the press.

(3) What if there is a requirement saying that you cannot utilize information until it has been published? The argument is assuming that there is no such requirement.

These are just some of the things that I am thinking of but I admit this is a fairly complex stimulus with a lot of detail. I may be at the mercy of the answer choices because there could be potential gaps I am not seeing.

Luckily, the first two answer choices are fairly easy eliminations. (A) and (B) are discussing the nature of those that serve on the journals. However, this really isn't relevant. We don't care who is on the journals. We only care about the process of publishing the journals and how public health could be/couldn't be dependent on this process.

(D) This can be a somewhat tricky answer. However, all this is really doing is evaluating the premise that the peer-review process is slow. (D) is saying that we could speed it up! That sounds fine and all, but for the purposes of this question it absolutely does not matter how fast or slow the process is; the point is that public health could be improved quicker if we used the information before it is published. Thus even if we can or cannot speed up the process of peer-review, the point of the argument is that we will be faster if we nip the process in the butt altogether.

(E) This is another slightly tricky answer. However, this is discussing what happens after a discovery is published. We don't care about what happens after; we care about what happens before!

(C) is the correct answer and is necessary for the argument to work. Let's say that people would not use information before it was first published. This would absolutely mean that there could be no improvement in quickness because the process of improving public health will be just as long as it was before. Either way, the doctors are going to wait until discoveries are published in journals so we can inform the press as early or late as we want - the process will be no quicker. That is what the negated (C) says and, because it makes the conclusion not follow, (C) is correct!