In the 2003 British Medical Journal obituary, Horrobin was described as ‘one of the most original scientific minds of his generation’.
In 2009 Medical Hypotheses became a cause célèbre. Bruce Charlton, who succeeded Horrobin as editor-in-chief, accepted a highly controversial article by Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, who contested the HIV basis of AIDS and argued that the South African government was right not to administer antiretroviral drugs to AIDS sufferers because the HIV–AIDS link remained unproven. Publication caused furore in the scientific world. Scientists associated with the US National Institutes of Health threatened to remove all subscriptions to Elsevier titles from the National Library of Medicine. Their demand was not only that Elsevier withdrew the article, but also to institute peer review at the journal.
Elsevier agreed and dismissed Charlton. Mehar Manku, who replaced him, assured that the journal would now ‘be careful not to get into controversial subjects’, the reverse of what Horrobin intended. Charlton later remarked: ‘The journal which currently styles itself Medical Hypotheses is a dishonest fake and a travesty of the vision bequeathed by the founder Professor David Horrobin; and as such it ought to be closed down—and on present trends it surely will be.’
From "Did Robert Maxwell start the censorship of science?" In Conservative Woman, 22 may, 2024.
The article suggests that the - completely successful - capture of science by "peer review" was actually begun by the publisher and spy Robert Maxwell being bankrolled by British Intelligence to buy up Pergamon Press in 1951 (later part of Elsevier) and institute the beginnings of peer review, on an international scale.
Whether or not the details provided are correct, it seems certain that something of the sort was afoot; as part of a multi-pronged (and, as I said, completely successful) strategy to capture and destroy real science; but transfer the name and prestige to what had become just-another branch of the global totalitarian bureaucracy.
And not just science but all of academia, education, the arts, law, churches, mass media - and all other major social systems.
The authors of this article end by saying: "For the sake of humanity, we need to revert to an open and objective scientific enterprise".
Clearly the authors don't grasp the depth and scale of social transformation: that "They" have won; and that "science" is long-since dead.
So there can be no "reversion" from where we now are, back anything good
All institutions are corrupt, and assimilated to the agenda of damnation.
From here, anything good (whether honest science, beautiful art, or whatever else) must be created anew from the ground-up.
And, quite frankly; in this existing world of secular-leftist-materialism triumphant; there are insufficient people, with inadequately strong motivation, for this actually to happen.
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NOTE: I tried to summarize the Medical Hypotheses Affair for a general audience in this article. Further information is available in subsequent posts of the same blog.
BTW - I was completely wrong when I predicted that the fake-journal styling itself Medical Hypotheses would be closed-down: it wasn't and isn't! It was not until a couple of years later, after assimilating the significance of the events, that I realized the totalitarian bureaucracy could and would often keep "alive" the formal identity of institutions it had assimilated - so long as this is useful for the larger agenda. And until The Whole Thing began its inevitable and irreversible collapse, which has not yet (at the time of writing) begun to be undeniable.
