Statement from The Lancet in response to Stephen Cox of The Royal Society

May 19 2005

The statement from Stephen Cox published (May 19, 2005) is astonishing. He fails to address any of the arguments set out in The Lancet’s editorial of May 21, 2005. His deeply personal invective directed against me, in response to an editorial that avoided all direct personal criticism of individuals, does a disservice to his important role as Executive Secretary of the Royal Society. Here are the facts:

1. Sir Martin Rees is the only candidate standing for election as President of the Royal Society. In the recently published newspaper profiles of him, he is clearly acknowledged as the next President. To suggest otherwise is utterly bizarre.

2. The argument in The Lancet’s editorial is against the mission of the Royal Society, not its Fellows, its Research Fellowships, or its Professorships. It is because the Fellows of the Royal Society are such a distinguished group that the Society should be working far harder than it presently is to harness their expertise on questions of urgent public policy. The comparison with the US Institute of Medicine that we make clearly shows that the Royal Society today punches well below its intellectual weight.

3. Holding meetings and lectures is all well and good. But the great strategic success of the US Institute of Medicine is that it convenes multidisciplinary groups of experts to gather evidence in order to throw light on priority areas of public health, clinical medicine, and health policy. The resulting reports make a tremendous contribution to political and policy decision making. No such strategic scheme of analysis is to be found at the Royal Society, weakening what should be its central role in our public culture. To cite one or two initiatives is only to prove The Lancet’s point that the output of the Royal Society, is, at best, meagre.

4. To raise the issue of The Lancet’s contribution to child health is a smoke screen. The journal, through its recent campaigns on child and newborn survival, has made a huge contribution to the global health of the child. Ask any expert in international child health. Indeed, that fact was acknowledged directly by Ann Veneman, the new Executive Director of UNICEF, in her address this week to the World Health Assembly.

5. To suggest that The Lancet displays a lack of commitment to developing world issues shows an embarrassing lack of knowledge about contemporary medicine. The Lancet has a reputation second to none in publishing research on matters of relevance to low-income countries and the least-advantaged peoples of the world.

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   Finally, Stephen Cox suggests that The Lancet is conducting a campaign against the Royal Society. Not so. In MMR Science and Fiction, I specifically pay tribute to the Royal Society for supporting programmes on science communication, education, and public dialogue. And in Second Opinion, I praise Bob May directly for his leadership in incorporating public concerns about science into the Society’s work. I also acknowledge and pay tribute to his early reforms of the Royal Society’s activities. In other words, I give praise where praise is due. In this case – the contribution of the Royal Society to public policymaking in medicine - it is not.

Richard Horton - Editor - The Lancet