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Conflicts of Integrity

 

A look at the views of Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet his defence of Sir Richard Doll and his part

in the downfall of Dr Andrew Wakefield Richard Horton’s long review of Devra Davis’s book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer in The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2008, held few surprises. He seemed to agree completely with Davis’s founding arguments, but was incapable of laying blame on industry and industrially biased-researchers for the growing toll that environmental pollutants are taking on the public health of developed nations.  For those not fortunate enough to have read Davis's book, it is possible to summarise its message. Since the 1930s, industry has disguised the detrimental effects of its processes and products on public........

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1 A part of this essay, principally about Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, was originally written as an article (Hardell and Walker 2008) for the New York Review of Books (NYRB) as a rebuttal of Horton's review of Devra Davis's book The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Davis 2007). However, despite Dr Hardell's stature as an epidemiologist a cancer clinician and researcher, the NYRB managed to avoid any communication with the authors on the three occasions that they wrote submitting it for publication. The rebuttal is here considerably extended to include more information that is germane to Horton's approach to dissent and dissenters in the matter of public and environmental health. Because Lennart Hardell's contribution to the earliest version was not substantial and because he is not familiar with the material in the second half of this new version he suggested that his name was withdrawn; instead his contributions throughout are footnoted.