When we speak about standards we may well ask ourselves what we mean. To most people standards mean something firmly fixed, or at least reproducible—something quite permanent or something that is quite definitely definable. As a matter of fact, there are few absolute standards. We may think of physical standards, such as the meter-bar, that can be stored away in a vault and can confidently be expected to remain the same, year in and year out. Or we may have what we call standard preparations. These are used, in the main, for checking measurement methods or technics. Standard samples of steel, for example, after careful analysis in the laboratory are sent out to the mill, where they are run through an analysis procedure as a check on its accuracy. Again, we have standards of radioactivity—a radionuclide accurately measured in the laboratory and then used to check measurement technics in a hospital or some other laboratory. In the field of human applications we have what may be called biological standards. ...
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A 1963 study studied this question.