David Horrobin
David Frederick Horrobin (6 October 1939 – 1 April 2003) was a British-Canadian entrepreneur, medical researcher, author and editor. He is best known as the founder of the biotechnology company Scotia Holdings and as a promoter of evening primrose oil as a medical treatment,[1] Horrobin was founder and editor of the journals Medical Hypotheses and Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, the latter journal (initially titled Prostaglandins and Medicine) co-founded with his then graduate student Morris Karmazyn.
Horrobin believed that many diseases involve a lack of fatty acid precursors and might be alleviated by supplementing with the appropriate fatty acid.
Horrobin died of pneumonia as a complication of
Education and academic career
Born in Bolton, England, Horrobin attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn,[citation needed] and King's College[citation needed] in Wimbledon. He studied medicine on scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, obtaining degrees in both medicine and surgery[citation needed], and during the same period earned a doctorate in neurophysiology and neuroendocrinology.[citation needed] On completing his pre-clinical work, Horrobin became a fellow of Magdalen College in 1963.[citation needed] At Magdalen, he was strongly influenced by the nutritionist Hugh Macdonald Sinclair and his hypotheses on essential fatty acids and degenerative disease.[citation needed]
Following participation in the
Drug companies and dietary supplements
Founding of Efamol and Scotia
While working as an academic investigator, in Africa and later, Horrobin developed a theory implicating altered fatty acid metabolism in schizophrenia. The idea did not generate interest,
Controversy and administration
Legal and regulatory problems
Horrobin, within several years of founding Efamol, was selling EPO in more than 25 countries. He marketed the supplement as a treatment for "PMS, alcoholism, pregnancy-induced hypertension, atopic eczema, elevated cholesterol levels, hypertension, scleroderma, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, mastalgia (breast pain) and other problems",
Efamol continued to ship EPO into the United States and to market its products. In a 1989 article on "health food frauds", the New York Times reported on the FDA's seizure of "more than $1 million worth" of illegal EPO. The FDA again accused Efamol of marketing the oil "with unsubstantiated claims of treating a wide variety of illnesses". Efamol's lawyers responded that the product was not dangerous and that it had not made unsubstantiated claims.[3] The American Dietetic Association, representing over 50,000 nutritionists, questioned the value of Horrobin's product since "one-tenth of a teaspoon of ordinary corn oil has as much of the fatty acids as a capsule of Evening Primrose Oil, at a fraction of the cost".[3] In 1989, the FDA commissioned a report by investigator Stephen Barrett, a medical doctor and consumer protection advocate. Barrett advised the FDA that Horrobin's marketing of Efamol was done in "a transparent attempt to evade the food and drug laws". In a report on the incident published by the consumer information organisation Quackwatch, Barrett also questions Horrobin's research ethics: "Would someone that contemptuous of the law have any qualms about faking data?"[5]
Allegations of selective reporting and research suppression
In 2006, a column in
Investor concerns about an "ailing company"
As the supplement sales generated revenue, Horrobin's company began work on numerous drugs, most of them containing evening primrose oil. In 1993, the company was floated and enjoyed several years of increasing capitalisation as Horrobin reassured investors who worried about the company's lack of success, operating losses and enigmatic nature.[21][22] Horrobin stated that any of four products in Scotia's drugs pipeline could bring the company billions of pounds in revenue.[23] In early 1995, Horrobin said that he hoped to receive approval in the "next 18 months to sell one or both" of two of these drugs.[23] In late 1996, Horrobin predicted that he would receive approval for one of the drugs "in under two years".[22] In 1997, Horrobin stated, "Scotia will be cash-positive by 2000".[21]
However, the initial successes of Scotia on the stock markets and Horrobin's reassurances were undermined by what investors perceived as long-standing and systemic problems at the company, and they saw their fears confirmed with the rejection in March 1997 of regulatory approval for Scotia's drug Tarabetic. Also known as Efamol, the product contained evening primrose oil and was intended to treat diabetic peripheral neuropathy.[24] Scotia immediately lost one quarter of its value. Licences for several evening primrose oil-containing drugs were later withdrawn. A Scotia product, Epogam, was reportedly the first drug to have its licence withdrawn as a result of "evidence that it didn't work".
By the end of 1997, Scotia was nearly broke and did not have enough money to fund another year of research.
Findings of fraud associated with Scotia trials also weighed on Horrobin's company. Goran Jamal, a doctor who had participated in developing Efamol, was found guilty of research fraud by the General Medical Council in 2003.[27] The Council ruled that Jamal had committed "serious professional misconduct for falsifying his results", manipulating the supposed randomisation of the clinical trial conducted over a decade earlier. Scotia was faulted by industry observers for what was called a "highly unusual" compensation scheme, as it had offered the doctor a portion of profits from future sales,[26] although the Council suggested that Jamal was prompted to commit fraud by his "belief" in the efficacy of the drug and not by his desire for financial gain.[24]
Horrobin's ousting from Scotia
Horrobin was ousted as chief executive of Scotia by a unanimous vote of the board[28][29] and was replaced on 1 January 1998 by Robert Dow, whom Horrobin had hired several months earlier to help with the company's business plan and investor relations. Horrobin remained until May 1998 as a non-executive director. When he tried to stage a "boardroom coup" to return himself to the executive position, the other directors refused to support him, and Horrobin resigned. As the company's value fell from about £600 m to £16 m,[15][28] Horrobin and his successor each blamed the other for the company's failure.[17] Scotia went into administration in 2001.[30]
Laxdale Ltd
Following his departure from Scotia, Horrobin set up a new company, Laxdale Ltd, to examine the use of omega-3
Research, publications and editorships
Horrobin was a prolific writer of academic and popular works. He was also the founder/co-founder and editor of two journals, and, with his brother Peter, the co-founder of MTP Press. Peter Horrobin later founded a religious cult, Ellel Ministries.
Scientific publications
Horrobin was an author on over 800 publications, including about 500 scientific papers,
Journal editor
Horrobin was a longtime critic of the anonymous peer review system,[39] which, he believed, stifled creativity and innovation in science. Horrobin founded and edited the non-peer reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses to provide an outlet for unorthodox ideas and research that would not be evaluated by other scientists before publication. Horrobin envisioned the journal as a resort for thinkers who were "very good at generating ideas, but are complete klutzes in the field" and committed to publishing ideas based only on whether he or other reviewers considered them "interesting and reasonable".[40]
Horrobin also co-founded the journal Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids.[15] Science writer Susan Allport, in her book on dietary fatty acids, states that Horrobin founded this journal to disseminate his ideas about evening primrose oil and fatty acids.[14]
Popular science
In the popular science book The Madness of Adam and Eve (2001), Horrobin outlined his hypothesis that schizophrenia contributed to the evolution of modern humans. According to Horrobin, fat metabolism was altered as humans evolved from other primates, leading to early humans with schizophrenia. These humans were more creative and did not experience as much physical pain as others.[41] Horrobin suggested that the "genes for schizophrenia are responsible for most of the religious sense, most of the technical and artistic creativity and most of the leadership qualities of modern human beings".[42] The Madness of Adam and Eve was one of six books shortlisted for the 2002 Aventis Prize (now the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books; the prize was won that year by Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell).[43] Reviews of the book were mixed, writing of a "useful contribution" that was also "highly partisan and selective";[41] an "engaging and plausible argument" that is "not so convincingly" argued;[42] and a book "brightly written" but with "a huge hole in its central premise"[44] Horrobin was somewhat critical of his theory, describing it as a "just-so story perhaps fed by my own personal delusions".[45] The book was compared unfavorably to similar works by Kay Redfield Jamison, who examines a possible link between bipolar disorder and artistic creativity.[42]
Death and obituary controversy
In 2001, Horrobin was diagnosed with
The BMJ obituary sparked a months-long controversy.[5][12][13][14][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] The obituary described Horrobin as "effortlessly prolific" and "one of the most persuasive people on earth", but also criticised him as excessively promoting evening primrose oil despite a lack of scientific evidence, noting that some critics questioned his ethics. It suggested that Horrobin "may prove to be the greatest snake oil salesman of his age", stating that his evening primrose oil would "go down in history as the remedy for which there is no disease" and reporting that several of Scotia's product licences were later withdrawn because the drugs were ineffective.[15] The obituary generated the largest e-mail response to an obituary in the history of the BMJ.[55] Respondents, including Horrobin's colleagues, friends and family, were largely critical of the negative tone of the obituary.[56] On behalf of Horrobin's family, Horrobin's son-in-law, Adam Kelliher, filed a complaint with the British Press Complaints Commission, alleging that the BMJ obituary was "inaccurate" and "intrusive at a time of grief" in violation of the Code of Practice.[57] Kelliher was founder and at the time chief executive of Equazen, a company marketing fish and evening primrose oils including a formulation called eye q, said to improve scholastic ability in children. However, in his initial complaint to the BMJ Kelliher stated that he had no competing interests. In reaction, the BMJ published an apology to Horrobin's family expressing regret for any distress caused. The journal corrected what its editor considered several insignificant[58] spelling and factual errors and published three further obituaries of Horrobin. However, the journal also defended its original obituary as fairly presenting "both the positive and negative aspects of its subject's life".[55][56][58] Kelliher did not accept the BMJ apology as genuine and maintained that inaccuracies and "unjustified slander" remained, but the Press Complaints Commission declined to take any action against the journal, stating that the BMJ had offered "sufficient remedial action". According to the commission, the journal was not obliged to omit negative information, including the journal's contention "that Dr Horrobin was 'in some ways a charlatan'".[57]
Posthumous honours
In June 2004, the scientific publisher Elsevier, having acquired the journal Medical Hypotheses, created an annual David Horrobin Prize for medical theory in his honour.[59] He was posthumously awarded the Stephen S. Chang Award by the American Oil Chemists' Society in 2003.[60]
Selected bibliography
- Horrobin, David F. (1964). The Communication Systems of the Body. New York: Basic Books. p. 214. ISBN 0-465-01287-6.
- Horrobin, David F. (1970). Principles of biological control. Aylesbury: Medical and Technical Pub. Co., Ltd. p. 70. ISBN 0-85200-002-2.
- Horrobin, David F. (1971). Essential Biochemistry, Endocrinology and Nutrition. New York: Medical and Technical Publishing Co. Ltd. p. 118. ISBN 0-85200-025-1.
- Horrobin, David F. (1972). A Guide to Kenya and Northern Tanzania. Scribner. p. 304. ISBN 0-684-12629-X.
- Horrobin, David F. (1977). Medical Hubris: A reply to Ivan Illich. Montreal: Lunesdale House. p. 146. ISBN 0-88831-086-2.
- Horrobin, David F. (1983). "The role of essential fatty acids and prostaglandins in the premenstrual syndrome". J Reprod Med. 28 (7): 465–8. PMID 6350579.
- Horrobin, David F. (1987). "Essential fatty acids, prostaglandins, and alcoholism: an overview". Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 11 (1): 2–9. PMID 3032012.
- Horrobin, David F. (Ed.) (1990). Omega-6 essential fatty acids: pathophysiology and roles in clinical medicine. New York: Wiley-Liss. ISBN 0-471-56693-4.
- Horrobin, David F. (1990). "Gamma linolenic acid". Reviews in Contemporary Pharmacotherapy. 1 (1). Carnforth, UK: Marius Press: 1–45. OCLC 729348324.
- Horrobin, David F. (1993). "Omega-6 and omega-3 essential fatty acids in atherosclerosis". Semin Thromb Hemost. 19 (2): 129–37. S2CID 40590225.
- Horrobin, David F. (1994). "Unsaturated lipids: a new approach to the treatment of cancer". World Rev Nutr Diet. World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics. 76: 77–80. PMID 7856241.
- Horrobin, David F. (1997). "Essential fatty acids in the management of impaired nerve function in diabetes". Diabetes. 46 (Suppl 2): S90–3. S2CID 10174746.
- Horrobin, David F. (2000). "Essential fatty acid metabolism and its modification in atopic eczema". Am J Clin Nutr. 71 (1 Suppl): 367S–72S. PMID 10617999.
- Horrobin, David F. (2001). The madness of Adam & Eve: how schizophrenia shaped humanity. London: Bantam. ISBN 0-593-04649-8.
- Peet, M. (2003). Glen I; Horrobin DF (eds.). Phospholipid spectrum disorders in psychiatry and neurology (2nd ed.). Carnforth, UK: Marius Press. ISBN 1-871622-25-5.
A more extensive bibliography is available on the Institute for Scientific Information website.[33]
References
- ^ a b Court, Mark (2 April 2003). "Pioneer of UK biotechnology dies of cancer". The Times. Archived from the original on 12 June 2011. Quote: "Dr Horrobin was best known for creating Scotia Holdings, a once sprawling biotechnology company which has the unfortunate distinction of being the UK’s only quoted biotechnology company to have collapsed into administration."
- PMID 1745654.
- ^ a b c d "F.D.A. in Battle on Health Food Frauds". The New York Times. 1 June 1989. Archived from the original on 15 February 2011. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
- ^ a b "General Nutrition, officials indicted", Lexington Herald-Leader (KY), 15 November 1984, p. C9
- ^ a b c d e f g "Primrose Oil and Eczema: How Research Was Promoted and Suppressed" Stephen Barrett, Quackwatch, 31 January 2004.
- ^ a b c d "How to avoid the bitter pill of regulation" Ben Goldacre, Bad Science Column, The Guardian, 23 September 2003.
- ^ a b Hoare C, Li Wan Po A, Williams H (2004). "Systematic review of treatments of atopic eczema". Health Technology Assessment. 4 (37).
- ^ "Epogam and Efamast lose product licences". The Pharmaceutical Journal. 269 (7215): 352. September 2002. Archived from the original on 4 December 2008. Retrieved 15 September 2009.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "David Horrobin". The Telegraph (Obituary). London. 2 May 2003. Archived from the original on 29 June 2011. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
- ^ "Should we give the biotechies money to burn?" Rosie Murray-West, The Telegraph, 11 September 2004.
- ^ a b c d e f Richmond, C. (17 April 2003). "David Horrobin – Champion of evening primrose oil". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 13 March 2010. Retrieved 15 September 2009.
- ^ PMID 15085824.
- ^ a b "'A rotter, a snake oil salesman, a chancer' – how scientist's obituary sparked a storm. A vitriolic attack in the British Medical Journal has devastated eminent academic David Horrobin's family, reports Robin McKie" Robin McKie, The Observer, in The Guardian, 25 May 2003.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-520-25380-3.
- ^ PMC 1125787.
- ^ a b "Fears over future of Quantanova". The Herald (Glasgow). 23 March 2002.
His initial interest was in schizophrenia, but after failing to raise funding for more research, he founded the cash-cow operation that would become Scotia.
- ^ a b c d e Clark, Andrew (26 January 2001). "Scotia collapses into bickering. The arguments get personal as trading in biotech firm's shares is halted". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 14 September 2009.
- ^ Staples, R (1995). "Scotia Pharmaceuticals: Harnessing the power of plants". Pharmaceutical Executive (Jan 1995): 56–62.
- ^ "General Nutrition will withhold 13 products", AP, Morning Call, Allentown PA, 7 December 1984, p. A.04
- PMID 14670885.
- ^ a b "The Investment Column: Scotia scrabbles for a success" Magnus Grimond, The Independent, 25 September 1997.
- ^ a b "Scotia's hopes for magic bullet" Tom Stevenson, The Investment Column, The Independent, 11 September 1996.
- ^ a b "Scotia's Unusual Approach May Yet Silence Critics : A Small Drug Firm Thinks Big" Erik Ipsen, The New York Times, 27 May 1995.
- ^ PMC 1169327.
- ^ a b " Scotia founder quits in shake-up at ailing biotech" Sameena Ahmad, The Independent, 10 December 1997.
- ^ a b "Fraud charge deals fresh blow to Scotia investors" Mark Court, The Times, 11 March 2003.
- ^ "Gulf War syndrome doctor faked £90m trial for diabetes drug" Ronan McGreevy, The Times, 28 March 2003.
- ^ a b c d "Obituary: David Horrobin". The Times. London. 9 April 2003. Retrieved 15 September 2009.
- ^ "Horrobin quits Scotia in dispute over chief" Andrew Yates, The Independent, 12 May 1998.
- ^ "Scotia placed in administration after EMEA rejects Foscan". The Pharmaceutical Journal. 266 (7133): 143. 2001. Archived from the original on 24 May 2010. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
- PMC 1126009.
- ^ Amarin Corporation 2nd quarter 2004 statement of results.
- ^ a b ISI publications list for David Horrobin[permanent dead link]
- New Zealand Herald. Wilson & Horton. Retrieved 26 March 2024.
- S2CID 21954007.
- OCLC 299992755.
- PMC 1818879.
- PMID 20313336.
- PMID 11166837. Archived from the originalon 14 August 2007. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
- ^ "First Publication For Seattle Theorist" The Scientist, 13 November 1989.
- ^ a b "A polluted puddle of poetry and psychosis" David Pilgrim, Times Higher Education, 5 October 2001.
- ^ a b c "The Lust for Life" Anthony Clare, The New Statesman, 16 April 2001.
- ^ "Prizes for Science Books – previous winners and shortlists". Retrieved 16 September 2009.
- ^ "The human stain. The Madness of Adam and Eve by David Horrobin asks the question: did schizophrenia make us sapient?" John McCrone, The Guardian, 28 April 2001.
- ^ "Fat is an insanity issue" The Telegraph, 7 April 2001.
- ^ "How a novelist's twist sparked academic feud. When the feted author of Birdsong slipped a recent psychiatric idea into his work, one don saw red" Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, 21 August 2005.
- S2CID 54267071.
- ^ Marks N (2003). "Was BMJ wrong to print critical obituary?" (PDF). CMAJ. 169 (1): 54.
- ^ Dietary supplements and functional foods by Geoffrey P. Webb. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 140519098
- ^ "Keeping an open mind" Archived 12 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine Murphy J., The Pharmaceutical Journal, 1 May 2004 Vol 272 No 7297 p543.
- ^ Warts ‘n’ all obituaries Prospect Magazine, Patrick West, 20 July 2003
- ^ "BMJ apologises for 'insensitive' obituary of doctor" Archived 16 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine Jon Slattery, Press Gazette, 25 July 2003.
- ISBN 1-85315-673-6.
- ISBN 978-3-540-31919-1
- ^ PMC 1126009.
- ^ PMC 1126010.
- ^ a b "Mr Adam Kelliher complained to the Press Complaints Commission, on behalf of the family of the late Dr David Horrobin" Press Complaints Commission, Report 63.
- ^ PMC 1126617.
- ^ Announcement of the David Horrobin Prize on the Elsevier site
- ^ Stephen S. Chang Award Archived 10 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine