A Giant in Medicine: Tribute to Drummond Rennie

A Giant in Medicine: Tribute to Drummond Rennie
by Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone Institute

Nephrologist Drummond Rennie died on 12 September 2025, aged 89. He was deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine and at JAMA, for a total of 36 years. 

Drummond’s key interest was to improve the quality of medical research. He made numerous outstanding contributions to science and received the 2008 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for promoting integrity in scientific research and publishing and for defending scientific freedom in the face of efforts to suppress research.

Drummond’s sense of humour was also outstanding. He told me that he was highly astonished to get an award from the biggest scientific association in the US, which publishes Science: “In my short acceptance speech, I thanked the pharmaceutical industry and my corrupt clinical colleagues for writing my scripts.”

Drummond was keenly aware of the dark side of science. When he, in 1986, conceived of and announced the first Peer Review Congress to subject peer review to scientific scrutiny and improve its quality, he wrote:

“There are scarcely any bars to eventual publication. There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.”

I met Drummond for the first time at the second Peer Review Congress in Chicago in 1993. The same year, I cofounded the Cochrane Collaboration and opened the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. Drummond was very supportive and became a director of the San Francisco Branch of the US Cochrane Center. We were frustrated that most of the medical literature was unreliable and our mission was to publish critical systematic reviews of trials of the benefits and harms of interventions in healthcare. 

Drummond described the old type of a scientific review as being the opinion of a pundit, panjandrum, poohbah, nabob, or lord high executioner, and when the BMJ asked us for advice about a conflicts of interest issue, he noted that if I disagreed with him, he would eat his hat publicly in Tavistock Square “and out in rural Oregon, it’s a pretty big hat.” I told him he didn’t need to eat his hat, which relieved him, “especially as I’d have had to buy the cowboy hat first.”

Pfizer’s Fraud with Its Antifungal Agent

In 1998, my wife, professor of clinical microbiology Helle Krogh Johansen, and I found out that Pfizer, one of the most criminal drug companies in the world, had rigged a series of trials of their antifungal agent, fluconazole, and we submitted our revelations to JAMA. 

Drummond found it uncomfortable and could blush if people praised him, but he was not shy of praising other people. He found our paper “excellent,” “wonderful,” and “famous,” and said he was “very happy to be associated with two such good scientists, and two such brave, open, and honest people.” Drummond had these qualities himself. 

Pfizer had combined the results for amphotericin B with those for nystatin in a “polyene” group even though it was well known that nystatin is ineffective in patients with cancer complicated by neutropenia. Drummond asked us to confirm this, which we did in a meta-analysis. Moreover, most patients received amphotericin B orally even though it was known that it is poorly absorbed and should only be used intravenously. 

It was also unclear if some patients were counted more than once, as the data were sliced and published several times, and as the reports were obscure. The primary investigators didn’t answer our questions but referred us to Pfizer which didn’t answer them either. 

Drummond and I discussed the paper’s legal implications at a meeting in Oxford we attended, and, as advised by JAMA’s lawyer, Drummond sent our paper to Pfizer’s CEO and asked for a written commentary for simultaneous publication in JAMA. Pfizer didn’t respond even though they had over six months to think about it. 

Despite repeated requests, neither the trial authors nor Pfizer provided us with separate data for the three arms in the rigged studies, and Pfizer didn’t explain why they had used the two comparators the way they had. 

In an editorial, Drummond noted that “fluconazole raced against a heavily handicapped opponent,” and in an interview, he said that Pfizer’s misconduct “corresponds to tying the legs of a racing horse and then telling everyone that it is much slower than its competitors.” 

Our article became frontpage news in the New York Times and created headlines elsewhere. 

Et Al. Gets Nobel Prize

Apart from guidelines for good reporting of research, I only published one article with Drummond, which was about inappropriate authorship: Half of Cochrane reviews had either honorary or ghost authors, or both, which is about not having contributed meaningfully, or having contributed without being named. Doctors’ attitude to authorship made one of my colleagues remark that if a doctor had lent Shakespeare a pencil, he would have become co-author of Macbeth. There is also an amusing letter with the title “Et al. gets Nobel Prize.” 

Drummond argued that credit and accountability cannot be assessed unless the contributions of authors are disclosed. His suggestions, which included that some contributors took on the role of guarantors for the integrity of the entire work, are now standard in reputable journals.

Cochrane Refuses to Drop Industry-Supported Authors

Drummond was my closest ally in my 15-year battle to get industry money out of Cochrane. 

In 2001, two Cochrane reviews on drugs for migraine were published, funded by Pfizer, the manufacturer of eletriptan. Drummond informed the US Cochrane Center director, Kay Dickersin, and me that:

“This very morning an author by mistake enclosed with his review a letter from a commercial subcontractor to the author, which I found in the package the authors sent me only because I have a strong sense of smell. This letter made it plain that a subcontractor for the drug company whose product was the subject of the review had actually written the review, and therefore all the solemn JAMA authorship responsibility forms signed by the people on the byline as authors were completely false and perjured. I would not have known this if the author’s secretary hadn’t made this stupid mistake.”

Drummond strongly condemned what had happened in Cochrane, as it would make Cochrane reviews incredible: “If the user, who is always much more skeptical than the authors, has to pick and choose which review is credible on the basis of sponsorship, then it’s all over. It staggers me that those in Cochrane who have helped with this decision do not see this as a terrible threat. The drug companies are aching to get into Cochrane so that they can take control of the reviews.”

In the early years of Cochrane, it was clear that industry funding would not be accepted, but we never wrote it down in a policy. After Drummond had lectured at a workshop for Cochrane editors I had arranged in Copenhagen in 2002, he wrote to me: “The most important result of the conference for me was that the Steering Group should be told of the low quality and great variability of some reviews…I thought the course was excellent and well designed and run, and I congratulate you. But it was that wonderful evening at your home that I most remember, and your beautiful family.”

Out of our workshop grew a proposal about banning commercial funding of Cochrane reviews. I prepared a letter for the Cochrane Steering Group to which Drummond replied:

“Don’t worry about the hostile messages…the criticisms will generally come under the following headings:

1. There are many other sorts of conflicts, so why worry about financial relationships? (Answer: Financial relationships are peculiarly damaging to credibility.)
2. You’ll never rule out all financial relationships with industry. (Answer: agreed. Rules and laws against theft and murder never rule them out completely, but they may reduce the prevalence and do we want a society with no such rules?)
3. Who else is going to give us the money to do our review? (Answer: Why do a review at all if no one believes its findings – and journals won’t publish them?)
4. We have other things to worry about so why bring this up now? (Answer: We always have other things to worry about. But reviews, which make up the Cochrane Library, are peculiarly subject to manipulation and bias from such influences as financial conflicts of interest. This is a major threat to the credibility of Cochrane and we’d be remiss not to face it squarely as soon as possible.)
5. I am an honorable person, stuffed full of ethics, and would never be bribed or influenced by money. How dare you suggest such a thing! (Answer: You are unique in the universe. Every study ever done shows that whether one looks at researchers, research, reviews, or doctors’ prescribing, commercial influence with money works an effect that biases behavior.)

What you will not hear, I suspect, is any concern for Cochrane’s credibility, nor the appalling damage that acceptance of industry money would do to the perception of Cochrane as a reliable, untainted source of information. I also see this from the point of view of an editor. My journal is highly unlikely to publish a review that comes from industry or is commercially sponsored. From now on, we at JAMA shall all be taking a much more skeptical look at Cochrane reviews as they come in, probing their funding which until now I had assumed was non-industry.”

Drummond was shocked to learn that industry funding for reviews was not merely about a couple of isolated incidents and his predictions came true. There was an outcry from the Cochrane leadership, with poor arguments.

Two years later, Drummond, Kay Dickersin, and I condemned industry funding of Cochrane reviews at a Cochrane meeting in Bergamo, but yet again, Cochrane’s reaction was one of denial. Jim Neilson, co-chair of the Steering Group, asked Drummond for details of the publications on the adverse effects of commercial sponsorship. There were plenty of such papers, and when Mike Clarke, also a co-chair, asked the same question, Drummond replied that it’s nonsense to deny influence, and that it is “the perception on the part of the public – professional and lay – that Cochrane is just like the rest – on the take and able to be influenced.

Those who make the naive argument that Cochrane reviews are somehow so rigorous that they cannot be biased only make themselves ridiculous to the public and the media…everyone in Cochrane should just say no to commercial (‘interested’) money. Any complexity in wording and listing of exceptions lead to all sorts of excuses.

Drummond told Kay and me that he felt strongly that we could not go to the next Cochrane meeting merely repeating the endless arguments of four previous meetings, and he agreed with me that it should not be a vote-counting procedure if we should accept industry money or not. He also underlined that JAMA editors now felt that Cochrane reviews “should be regarded as likely to be as biased commercially as any others. This is very sad for me – and, I am sure, for you too – since freedom from this bias was one of Cochrane’s really important selling points.”

The toughest battle I had with my fellow centre directors was in Providence in 2005, which exhausted both Drummond and me. A few centres got financial support from drug companies and the atmosphere was very tense. We didn’t buy any of the silly arguments. I said that if centres couldn’t survive without industry support, they shouldn’t survive. 

Drummond rarely participated in the half-yearly centre directors’ meetings. When he, to my big surprise, showed up at our meeting in Melbourne six months later, and I asked him why he had taken time off his busy schedule, he replied: “I am here to protect you against yourself!”

We succeeded in getting industry money out of Cochrane centres but with tortoise speed: “Direct funding currently in place can continue, but should be phased out over the next five years.” Imagine if a woman said to her husband: “You may continue seeing prostitutes but please phase it out over the next five years.”

We also succeeded in putting a ban on industry funding of reviews, but when I argued that people should not be allowed to be authors if they were on industry payroll for the company whose product they evaluated, I ran into a stone wall. 

Deeply disappointed, I didn’t do much for the next seven years, apart from protesting when a satellite symposium sponsored by Gilead Sciences was allowed at the Madrid Cochrane Colloquium in 2011. This company has violated federal anti-kickback laws, defrauded government programs, and caused millions in false claims to be submitted to state and federal health systems. 

In 2012, I asked the Steering Group to change the commercial sponsorship policy, as it was outdated, logically inconsistent, and ambiguous, and as the funding arbiters agreed with me, saying the policy had been difficult to use. My offer to rewrite the policy for people to comment on was declined, but I got the opportunity to comment on various drafts. 

As is typical for Cochrane, I was not included in the final stages, and there was a good reason why they kept me at arm’s length. It took two years to revise the policy, and the result was disastrous. I therefore consulted the Advisory Board of my centre explaining that the policy allowed two full-time Pfizer employees to co-author a Cochrane review of one of Pfizer’s drugs, provided there were at least three other authors who were not conflicted.

Drummond replied that “No doubt others share my rising sense of irritation. I have vivid memories of so many of these exact discussions, for example in Barcelona (in 2003) and then in (snowy) Bergamo ten years ago in 2004. The present dispiriting debate is a perpetuation of Cochrane’s apparent ability to say yes while pretending always to say no.” He suggested that we open the issue for public discussion noting, with his usual humour, that our group had already come up with the impressive discovery that money talks. 

Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ and also a board member, was frank. She said that if I had asked her what Cochrane’s policy was, she would have said without hesitation that Cochrane authors are all independent of industry: “That’s what it says on the tin.” 

This is still the case today: “We do not accept commercial or conflicted funding. This is vital for us to generate authoritative and reliable information, working freely, unconstrained by commercial and financial interests. Our work is recognized as representing an international gold standard for high quality, trusted information.”

Fiona agreed that the new policy was unclear “and to a cynic would appear to be purposefully misleading. You read the first clause and it says one thing. You read the second and it says something else. A reader is meant to be reassured by the first clause and perhaps not intended to read on to the second. Not only is the policy a betrayal of independence but the way in which it is presented is a betrayal of trust.”

Indeed. The policy was dishonest, and the two clauses were contradictory. As they are no longer available on the Internet, I reproduce them here:

2. Cochrane reviews cannot be conducted by authors who in the last 3 years have received financial support from commercial sponsors or sources who have a real or potential vested interest in the findings of the review (for example through receiving remuneration from employment by a commercial sponsor (as defined above), consultancy, grants, fees, fellowships, support for sabbaticals, patents, royalties, stocks from pharmaceutical companies, advisory board membership or otherwise).

a. This guidance should apply to the majority of authors, and the contact author of a Cochrane review e.g. if there are five authors, at least three of them should have no COI relevant to the review and this should include the contact author. If there is an even number of authors, the same rule applies, e.g. of eight authors, at least five must not have conflicts, including the contact author. Teams of two cannot have any member with a conflict.

David Tovey, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, also a member of my Advisory Board, agreed that the policy should be revised “with some urgency” in the light of my criticisms. Pretty remarkable, considering that countless people had worked on the policy for two years! It was revised in less than a month.

However, the policy was still deficient, and I was so frustrated that I submitted the paper, “Cochrane authors and editors on drug industry payroll: Is this what the public wants?” to the BMJ, which, to my big surprise, rejected it. In 2020, I published “Cochrane authors on drug industry payroll should not be allowed” in a BMJ sister journal. 

When I had been elected for the Cochrane Governing Board, I suggested in 2017 to change our policy so that no one with financial conflicts of interest would be allowed to become author of a review that evaluated that company’s product. This was agreed and I rewrote the policy in an afternoon. But I was immediately neutralised. It took Cochrane over two years before the world saw the groundbreaking result of its elaborate processes: “The proportion of conflict-free authors in a team will increase from a simple majority to a proportion of 66% or more.” 

It took Cochrane 16 years to arrive at this “new, more rigorous ‘conflict of interest’ policy,” as it was called, after I had pointed out in Barcelona in 2003 at a plenary talk that a better policy was needed. 

The HealthWatch Newsletter had the headline, “Cochrane policy change raises eyebrows” and quoted me for saying that “Semmelweis never told doctors to wash one hand only. Wash both…Cochrane’s ‘strengthened’ commercial sponsorship policy is like eating the cake and still having it. It is like going from declaring to your spouse that you are unfaithful half of the days in a month to ‘improving’ by declaring that from now on you will only be unfaithful one third of the days.”

The Mammography Screening Scandal

In 2001, the biggest scandal in Cochrane’s 8-year history erupted. When we submitted our review of mammography screening review to the Australian-based Cochrane Breast Cancer Group – which had a financial conflict of interest, as it was funded by the centre that offered breast screening in Australia – the editors refused flatly to let us include data on the most important harms of screening, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment of healthy women, even though such outcomes were listed in our protocol the group had accepted and published. We published the full review in the Lancet, and its editor, Richard Horton, wrote a scathing editorial about the affair that was very harmful for Cochrane’s reputation.

I wrote to Drummond, “If I am put on trial by the Cochrane inquisition, facing charges of
‘Cochrane slaughter’ and high treason, and threats of closing down the Nordic Cochrane Centre, I hope I can get help from brave, sensible, incorruptible people like you.”

Drummond replied that “When you are on trial, I shall support you strongly, of course,
though, as usual, my evidence is for sale to the person who gives me the largest number of free mammograms.”

Drummond participated in conference calls I had with the chair of the Cochrane Steering Group and he wrote: “I would be very greatly disappointed if we did not also try to lay the groundwork for a much healthier and stronger Collaboration.” He asked if a Cochrane review was a scientific or a political document: “Is there no possibility of decent dissent?” 

During one of the calls, I was very unwell, with an infection. Drummond wrote afterwards: “I am extremely worried about you, and Helle and the children…There’s a strong link between emotional exhaustion and illness. Please know that you have many, many friends and supporters all over the world who care very much about you.” 

I replied that it started as a typical virus infection but wouldn’t go away, and “as other stupid males, I did not follow Helle’s advice to see a doctor. It got worse, though, and Helle diagnosed today a pneumonia with myriads of Gram-negative rods.” Drummond replied: “It’s a relief to hear you are finally listening to Helle. I am the same. I sometimes think that wives should be given thick pieces of wood to hit their husbands with regularly, and a few extra hits every time their temperature rises.”

Helle was greatly worried about Cochrane manners and was convinced that I would soon have to look for another job. After my recovery, I told Drummond that it seemed to me that I was slowly being strangled and that my centre might be closed down by the Steering Group: “I simply don’t fit into the system which is: don’t criticise your fellows in public (here we say: don’t shit in your own nest). I have seriously started to think to myself that I better leave.” 

Drummond replied: “I cannot imagine that anyone wants to get rid of you – you are obviously one of Cochrane’s most distinguished researchers and most valuable assets – or wants to close down your Center. You might consider doing all you can to stop anyone thinking that is a useful or possible solution to the insistent problem of dissent within the Collaboration, which will come up again and again in the future. It’s obvious to me that it is not a solution for anything and I feel sure that many others see things the same way.”

Drummond did not hold the Cochrane leadership in high regard, and when I asked him in 2010 to become a member of my centre’s Advisory Board, he replied: “I am honored, and of course I accept. We can give each other short doses of psychotherapy.”

As I have documented, it didn’t last long before Cochrane abandoned its ideals, and the moral decline worsened over time. Cochrane became a social club where camaraderie was more important than getting the science right and telling women that mammography screening might harm them. 

When the harms had still not been included in the review in 2003 (it took me five years of complaints to the Cochrane leaders to obtain this), Drummond wrote: “It’s the usual Cochrane mess: no one knows who is responsible for dealing with a problem, so everyone tries to.” And when Cochrane’s then publisher, Update Software, refused to follow Steering Group orders and remove a defamatory and abusive comment about me, published as a comment on the review, Drummond wrote: “If this causes you rage, take an old golf club, go out onto a course, bend and twist it into a knot and then, with a loud Viking oath, hurl it into a lake.” 

Drummond had been a keen golfer with scratch handicap, and Helle had been an elite golfer, too, with handicap 5. When she won a big golf tournament with her partner, with 540 starting teams, Drummond wrote: “What a clever man Peter is to have married you, and how lucky his friends, like myself, are to have you as a friend too. I am completely in awe of your achievement and I shall never, under any possible circumstances challenge you to a round of golf.”

Drummond often underlined our deep friendship, e.g., by ending his emails “with love to Helle” or “a huge hug for your gorgeous wife.” He had one himself, Deborah, whom he introduced as a previous belly dancer. 

The defamatory statement was ultimately removed, but as usual for Cochrane processes, it took a very long time and a lot of talk before this happened. 

Drummond wrote to the Cochrane Breast Cancer Group that “Cochrane commits to having only one version, which is tantamount to saying that in an area of debatable science there is only one correct answer, one correct version, and that other versions are wrong. This is completely anti-science.”

When, in 2004, I received a package from Germany from an unknown sender and suspected it contained a bomb from a mammography screening zealot, Drummond replied: “I know the feeling. There was a time when I sent my St Bernard dog to check under the bed to see that Kopans [Daniel, a highly aggressive US radiographer] hadn’t installed a small hydrogen bomb there.” He also said that “in the case of mammography, as an editor I have come under angry personal attack, several attempts to get me fired, and accusations of scientific misconduct, widely circulated and requiring some considerable effort to refute.”

Other Issues in the 2000s

In 2006, Drummond called me because JAMA was going to publish two papers about noninferiority and equivalence trials, and the editor at JAMA who had promised to write an editorial had become unable to do so. He asked me to write it, with a two-week deadline. I had never taken any particular interest in this issue, apart from being sceptical towards this newest industry fad, a scepticism the JAMA editors shared. But all of a sudden, people who read my editorial thought I was some kind of expert on this. 

That year, my research group published “Constraints on publication rights in industry-initiated clinical trials” in JAMA based on a cohort of protocols and corresponding publications. Drummond asked us to look also at a more recent sample of protocols. I was disappointed that we were only offered a research letter and wanted to publish elsewhere, but after having discussed the issue with biostatistician Doug Altman, a co-author with whom I have published more papers than with anyone else, and my wife, I changed my mind. Drummond was delighted and wrote: “You’re a good friend, and Helle, who probably persuaded you to change your mind by hitting you on the head with a #5 iron, is a heroine.”

I also published a review of data extraction errors in meta-analyses that use standardized mean differences. Drummond wanted to know if they were important for the reviews’ conclusions, which caused us a lot of extra work, as we needed to replicate full meta-analyses. But I never said no to Drummond and he never said no to me. 

In 2007, I pointed out that what I found worst about letters to the editor was that, when readers had explained carefully that there were major flaws in a study, the study authors usually got away with a cloudy reply. This smoke screen often succeeds in confusing the readers, many of whom are not experts in the area in question and don’t know if they should believe the authors or their critics. Drummond replied: “In my journal, anyone is free to make a fool of himself and usually does.” I did a study of this with two BMJ editors and a PhD student.

When I learned, also in 2007, that the annual Cochrane meeting in 2010 would be held in Keystone, Colorado, I objected to the Steering Group. I had suffered from mountain sickness and knew how awful it could be, and at an elevation of 2,600 m, a lot of people would get sick. 

I informed Drummond because he was an ardent mountain climber for most of his adult life, including in the Himalayas, and an expert in high-altitude physiology. He noted that the reason high altitude research groups work at Keystone is that so many people get acute mountain sickness! He had treated a young female triathlete who lapsed into coma on her third morning at Keystone, with high altitude cerebral oedema. She came within a whisker of dying.

Drummond estimated that around 25% of the Cochrane people would develop mountain sickness and a colleague told him about another venue at the same altitude where a questionnaire of conference participants showed that 30% would never return if the conference were to be held there again.

So, how did Cochrane, a supposedly evidence-based organisation, react to Drummond’s insight? Although they had three years to think about it, they didn’t change the venue. And, as usual, they blamed the messenger, me. I wrote to Nick Royle, then Cochrane’s CEO: 

“It surprises me that you end your letter with this sentence: ‘I hope and trust that we can now move on with planning for the event unencumbered by further debate on this decision.’ A fair translation of this would be: Peter, shut up! It is not appropriate that you write like this to me, or to anyone else, for that matter.”

Adrian Grant, co-chair of the Steering Group, copied me secretly on his reply to Royle:

“I advise you to think hard about how you should reply to this. You did finish your email to Peter with an unfortunate sentence and I can understand why Peter considers this discourteous. In many ways, Peter is the ‘conscience’ of the Collaboration. We may find him irritating at times, but we should never ever be dismissive of him.”

When Helle saw this while at work, she wrote to me: “It is good that they are not all amateurs in Cochrane.” Early on, Helle had dubbed Cochrane the amateurs’ paradise.

Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime

Giants like Drummond are extremely rare. Most doctors follow the crowd and many have been corrupted by industry money, to the great detriment of their patients. In my 2013 book, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, I write that “many of the crimes committed by the drug industry wouldn’t be possible if doctors didn’t contribute to them.”

When I asked two friends, Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief at the BMJ, and Drummond to write forewords, they readily accepted. Arguing why my book is worth reading when there are already many books about the way pharmaceutical companies pervert the scientific process, Drummond said, “The answer is simple: the unique scientific abilities, research, integrity, truthfulness, and courage of the author.” He wrote to me that “What it comes down to, of course, is what matters in climbing: trust. There aren’t so very many people I trust, and you are a great example of this small bunch.”

This illustrates so well our close friendship. I could have said the same about Drummond. Journalists have often asked if I have many enemies. Indeed, millions, but my friends are some of the best you can imagine. Drummond had many friends. When he changed his private address in 2000, he wrote to 118 people.

People who are willing to suffer or even die for their moral principles are some of the most amazing people you can meet. I always saw Drummond that way but the price can become too high. Drummond asked me to remove the following from my book, which I did:

“After it was discovered that the CLASS paper in JAMA was fraudulent, one of its deputy editors, Drummond Rennie, gave a lecture where he explained that the FDA had shown the trial report was dishonest. Rennie showed a few slides and the last one stated that the authors – who were all on Pfizer payroll – were laughing all the way to the bank.

Pfizer was very worried that its misconduct could lead to a number of legal proceedings and it subpoenaed Rennie who needed to spend a good deal of his time talking to lawyers. It also cost money for JAMA. Pfizer’s lawyers didn’t have much humour and asked which bank Rennie was talking about and how he could know that the authors were laughing? Rennie tried to explain it was a joke and when he couldn’t move the lawyers he added that lawyers also make jokes. For example, when they start a sentence by saying, With all due respect and then continue by providing a tremendous insult, it’s not an expression of all due respect, it’s a joke.”

Drummond had told me the story over a beer in the sunshine in Amsterdam and there were some issues about the details. The company was Pharmacia, later bought by Pfizer, and Drummond believed the subpoena came from lawyers suing Pfizer: “The whole episode ate up a great deal of time, trouble for me, and neither of us want trouble over such an unimportant detail.”

Drummond joked about everything, including himself, and here are some examples:

• As Yet Uninstitutionalised Poohbah.
• Fatuous old gasbag.
• I am grossly incompetent.
• I hope you won’t think me obtuse, ponderous, or plain stupid.
• I am misguided, vindictive, illiterate, and confused.
• To my great surprise, I have now completed my slide presentation. 
• A few minutes ago I sent off a half-completed email, by putting my coffee cup on a couple of keys.
• Soon, perhaps before I drop dead, I shall stop apologizing for being slow, late, deficient, defective and a nuisance to deal with.
• Great job. Further tinkering with the Statement seems unnecessary – and that’s from an editor, paid to spoil the best efforts of his colleagues.
• During the financial crisis in 2008 he wrote: I had the added distraction that my bank – a huge one – collapsed last Thursday and it looks as though I will manage in retirement only if I never, ever retire, and work two jobs until I am over 130.
• About a fellow mountain climber, he said: “I pulled out before I killed him.”
• Yesterday, after I’d become worked up over some issue, my assistant wrote to me “Drummond, you need to go home now, I think I hear your mother calling.” Helle will explain.

The Final Years

When Drummond retired from JAMA in 2013 aged 77, a Roast, which is a banquet at which the guest of honour is subjected to good-natured ridicule, was arranged at the Peer Review Congress in Chicago. It was an unforgettable event. We paid tribute to Drummond by writing anecdotes in a book, some of us gave a speech, and tears of laughter filled the room. 

Perhaps I should have left Cochrane in 2001. Drummond was wise enough to leave but I stayed and was expelled in 2018 after one of the worst show trials ever in academia. When I got a seat at the Governing Board, with the most votes of all 11 candidates because I had openly declared that I wanted to change the CEO’s direction of travel, he arranged for my expulsion. 

Fiona Godlee hit the nail on the head when she wrote that Cochrane should be committed to holding industry and academia to account, and that my expulsion from Cochrane reflected “a deep seated difference of opinion about how close to industry is too close.”

Two months later, Drummond comforted me: “You have continued to be yourself, and that means being an enormously valuable member of Cochrane. I believe that the attempts to oust you from your position are wrong and based on an anti-science approach. We all know, and I have known for at least 24 years, that you are an uncomfortable character, but those of us who take the time and make the effort accept that fact and welcome your enormous scientific and moral contributions.”

In March 2019, I established the Institute for Scientific Freedom, where I mention Socrates on the opening page: “We are indebted to Socrates. Even today, people are executed for asking questions. The Institute for Scientific Freedom works to preserve honesty and integrity in science and to help develop a better healthcare where more people will benefit; fewer will be harmed; and more will live longer in good health.” 

This was also the idea with Cochrane but its moral meltdown was easy to see. In January 2019, a news piece in BMJ started thus: “The dust is not yet settling on Cochrane after it expelled one of its most high-profile scientists and founding fathers. Peter Gøtzsche’s sacking and the resignation of four fellow Cochrane board members in protest has been held out by some as a symptom of a wider malaise at the heart of the international network. Cochrane, they say, has lost its way, its members increasingly disenfranchised from a corporate centre focused on income generation and ‘message control.’”

I asked Drummond, now 83 years old, to become a member of my Advisory Board and he replied: “I am flattered by your invitation, and though I cannot spend time on this, I accept because to do so would be consistent with all our previous contacts and our relationship. Many thanks and good luck.”

Drummond’s love, support, and appreciation of our collaboration and friendship never faded. I had the last email exchange with him in March 2019 where he wrote: “I owe you a great deal, Peter. Over the years, you have taught me again and again how a man of high principle should behave, and I am tremendously grateful…You are one of the most interesting, dedicated, and brilliant men I know. Your friendship means a very great deal to me, Peter…when I am recovered enough to travel, we can again resume our wonderful discussions over a wonderful meal in your wonderful city, and do so as warm friends.”

Drummond had physical health problems and we did not see each other again. He stopped using email but we spoke on the phone a couple of times during the following years.

In my professional life, apart from my wife, no one has meant so much to me as Drummond, and he constantly told me he was my strongest supporter. I miss him tremendously. So much so that I come to think of Duke Ellington whose concert in Uppsala I attended in 1971. He used to say to his audience: “We love you madly.” That’s how I felt about Drummond.

A Giant in Medicine: Tribute to Drummond Rennie
by Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society