Reprint
Inquiry agrees scientist did fake research on pill
The Sunday Times
March 29 1987
By Brian Deer
THE Australian university at the centre of the contraceptive pill scandal, exposed last September by The Sunday Times, has backed the findings of our investigation into an eminent British scientist who faked important research giving an all-clear on pill side effects.
According to the inquiry report released this weekend by Deakin University, Gelong, Professor Michael Briggs, former head of its science department and a world authority on the pill, did not do any of the research in Australia that he claimed. The inquiry, which lasted six months, found that:
● The methods cited in Briggs’s scientific papers on the pill could not have produced the results he claimed. The inquiry concluded that “the results reported in a number of these publications could only have been obtained by fabrication”.
● Briggs did not have a personal laboratory to perform his alleged research and he was never seen to carry out experiments. He nevertheless published influential scientific papers on pill side effects which he claimed to have produced at Deakin between 1976 and 1984.
The low-dose “triphasic” pills gained most from Briggs’s efforts, which presented them as being the least likely to produce risks of heart disease and other serious illnesses associated with the pill. In Britain these pills are marketed as Logynon and Trinordial, used by more than 2m women.
After questions were raised about his research, Briggs fled to Spain in 1985 where last autism he was found and confronted in Marbella. Two months later he died aged 51, leaving a wife, Dr Maxine Briggs, joint author of much of his work.
Deakin’s inquiry is likely to cause a storm in the pharmaceutical industry, where Briggs’s main backers, Schering AG of West Berlin and Wyeth Laboratories of Pennsylvania, have been under pressure for an explanation. Both paid for and made extensive use of Briggs’s work to promote their products, but have now deleted all reference to his work from their literature.
Dr Bryan Hudson, a leading authority on the pill who gave evidence to the inquiry, claims the companies had appeared uninterested in how Briggs produced his findings. “It raises big questions about the relationship between a research person and drug companies and of the ethics of a drug company supporting research,” he says.
A spokesman for Schering AG’s UK subsidiary, where Briggs had once been head of research, declined to comment. The company maintains it had no knowledge of Briggs’s deceptions and that there there was no risk to women taking low-dose pills.
Wyeth said it too had had no suspicions. “This is something I can hardly believe said Dr Thomas Christie, the company’s medical director in Philadelphia. “He was a recognised expert and an expert for the World Health Organisation. I had to accept his word as a scientist.”