Last week, following the guilty verdict of the GMC Fitness to Practice Hearing in the case of Wakefield, Murch and Walker-Smith, the Lancet and one other journal expunged Wakefield's work from the academic record. A person's work is often their life and erasure of this work from the record under a determination of dishonesty, is very close to erasure of the subject's life. To erase scientific work from the history and progress of science, is perhaps the closest you can come to academic assassination; it is not, however, something new. It is perhaps a sign of the growing power of the chemical and pharmaceutical corporation that what was at first only threatened is now a viable option for corporate science.
Those who imagine that this liquidation of a person's work from the record is a novel technique invented solely for the use of pharmaceutical companies in relation to Dr Wakefield, should take a look at the shenanigans that surrounded the 1985 Australian Royal Commission on Agent Orange and dioxin on Australian personnel during the Vietnam War. [1] Agent Orange was a herbicide dropped by the US and their allies on forested areas of Vietnam so as to expose insurgent fighters and groups. Agent Orange contained dioxin in large quantities. Shortly after involvement in dropping Agent Orange in Vietnam, US and Australian troops and even the dogs used by the military showed serious adverse reaction to the chemical. The Vietnamese are still having to cope with familial genetic damage caused by Agent Orange forty years later.
The Australian Royal commission was from the start a 'get-up'. Two Swedish doctors, Lennart Hardell and Olaf Axelson, had some years before the commission managed to get dioxin-based herbicides banned in Sweden. Hardell gave evidence to the Royal Commission but he paid dearly for this privilege. The judge's final verdict that there was no evidence that exposure to Agent Orange, including TCDD (Dioxin), was a health hazard turned out to be an almost verbatim account of a Monsanto submission on the issue.






Recent Comments