Article 70P8V Drummond Rennie obituary

Drummond Rennie obituary

by
Penny Warren
from Science | The Guardian on (#70P8V)

Doctor and medical editor who inaugurated the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication

In deciding what research to publish and how to appraise it, medical journals bear a heavy responsibility - as seen when it goes awry. In 1998, for instance, the Lancet published a paper falsely linking autism with the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. They retracted the paper, but the genie was out of the bottle: the ensuing health scare reverberates to this day.

The British-born doctor and editor Drummond Rennie, who has died aged 89, was a towering figure in American medical journals, on a mission to combat inaccuracy in science reporting and drive up standards. A cartoon in the British Medical Journal in 2001 depicted him as a biblical prophet, beckoning his fellow medical editors towards the promised land" of rigorous science reporting. He was the deputy editor of two of the world's most influential medical journals: the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), from 1977 to 1981; and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), from 1983 to 2013.

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