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Soundbites

“The programme conflates ideas and events in a way that ‘inappropriately indicates Dr Wakefield to be more reasonable and thoughtful than the history would suggest’.â€

A letter from an unnamed former colleague of Andrew Wakefield, the doctor whose claims sparked the MMR/autism scare, asking the UK TV channel Five not to broadcast the docudrama it has made (The Guardian, London, 3 December)

“If I am a scientist working in an NIH lab and I get a lot of money in consulting fees, then I’m going to want to make sure that the company does very well.â€

Arnold Relman, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, on private consulting by government scientists (The LA Times, 7 December)

“If each embryo was a person, heaven would be populated mainly by people who have never been born.â€

Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford on the fact that most human embryos die very early in development (meeting of the UK Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, 8 December)

“They are no more than infomercials paid for by drug firms.â€

David Healy of the University of Wales, Bangor, on the scientific papers written by ghost writers paid by drug companies (The Observer, London, 7 December)

“The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of people.â€

Allen Roses, world vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (The Independent, London, 8 December)