The alarming history of Peer Review
The mechanics are simple enough. A draft article is submitted to the editorial board of a journal who determine whether the paper can or cannot be published, and if published, whether amendments should be made.
In reality, the whole process of peer review is a complex quagmire since academic careers depend on them and they have also become the litmus test of ‘truth’.
So, perish the thought of an academic career without a clutch of peer-reviewed journal articles behind you; forget likewise prestigious grant funding to catapult your career or the ultimate accolade, a Nobel prize; or a post in a prestigious institution unless your articles actually appear in highly-ranked journals – yes, there’s a league table of journals with the most highly ranked arguably having the most narrow focus.
A cynic might say that this ensures that this is ‘a totally controlled enterprise… reinforcing official knowledge and power’ (Moss and McCrae, xxxx).
In this article, we consider the little-discussed history of how it came to occupy a pivotal place in academia. So buckle up and prepare for some surprises!
It may be hard to conceive but until the early 1950s, there was no such thing as peer-review. Until then, most English-language STEM books and journals had been published by learned societies and were almost exclusively devoted to works published for their members.
All that changed in 1951 when a 28-year-old Robert Maxwell (pictured) purchased three-quarters of Butterworth Press for a cool £500,000 in today’s value, renaming this ‘Pergamon Press’. The
initial emphasis was on Science, Technology and Medicine journals, all using Peer Review, and this led commentator, Myer Kutz (2019), to write that ‘Maxwell, justifiably, was one of the key figures — if not the key figure — in the rise of the commercial STM journal publishing business in the years after World War II’.
By 1959, Pergamon was publishing 40 journals, a figure that sky-rocketed to nearly four times this number by 1965 to 150, According to the man in charge of distribution there for three decades, Brian Cox, journal circulation grew by five to ten percent annually during the 1960s.
Pergamon stole a march on other publishers and its influence was huge. By 1996, one million peer reviewed articles had been published, a figure that more than doubled to 2.5 million in 2009, a mere ten years later.
Now, in 2024, there are nearly 30,000 scientific journals with ~4.7 million articles published each year, and this is just the area of science!
If we pause the history of Peer Review for a moment, we can ask how Maxwell had the funds in 1951 to complete a purchase totalling £500million. If we rewind the clock, we encounter some intriguing anomalies and connections. For, back in 1940, Maxwell was a penniless 16 year-old who had left his native Czech home land , finding safety in Britain.
His talent for languages saw him transferred to intelligence work and it was during an assignment in Paris in 1944, 21 years of age and four years out of the army, that he met his Huguenot wife,
Elisabeth. After the war ended in 1945, he spent two years in occupied Germany with the British Foreign Office as head of the press section and somehow, just four years out of his placement with the Foreign Office, he found £500,000 to buy the publishing press from which he started Pergamon Press.
How was this possible?
According to an article in the New York Times by Craig Whitney (1991), Maxwell was able to turn the Press into a thriving business with ‘a bank loan and money borrowed from his wife’s family and from relatives in America’.
That however ignores the question as to how, just four years out of military service, he found half a million pounds (in today’s values) to purchase Butterworth Press.
For the first time, we can reveal important clues, this time from a short BBC video on Maxwell’s links to intelligence –
Running to a little over two minutes in length, and created in 2022, it describes how he became a KGB agent whilst in Berlin whilst also presenting himself to M16 as someone who had ‘established connections with leading scientists all over the world’.
The investigative journalist narrating the video, Tom Bower goes on to state (at 1.5 minutes) that ‘Unbelievably what he really wanted was for M16 to finance him to start a publishing company’.
This point is corroborated directly by Desmond Bristow, former M16 Officer (see 2 minutes into the video) who states that Maxwell asked M16 if they could pay for a publishing business. The fact that by 1951 Maxwell had spent only four years as a civilian, with no lucrative activity behind his name, makes it possible to entertain the notion that the intelligence services bankrolled the establishment of Peer Review, perhaps to control post-war knowledge.
The name that Maxwell selected for the press, ‘Pergamon Press’, is perhaps equally telling since ‘Pergamon’ was the ancient site, allegedly home to Satan’s throne (Revelation, 2:12). So, you could argue that a system of peer review in which the information that gets published is tightly controlled by an editorial board, is an activity on the dark side.
Then, just seven years into his launch of Pergamon Press, Maxwell was able to pay a cool £96,000 for the annual leasing charge (in today’s values) of the 53-room mansion in Oxford, Headington Hill Hall, that he leased from Oxford City Council.
Of course, we must not overlook his undoubted business flair for it was his idea to flatter editors-to-be with the kudos of presiding over a journal title that opened with the words
‘International Journal of x’. So, whilst a ‘bibliographic nightmare for librarians’ – the words of Brian Cox who spent 31 years working at Pergamon – this form of words was nothing less than a psychological and marketing stroke of genius.
The journals proliferated like rabbits until 1991 when he sold Pergamon to the Dutch publisher, Elsevier, for a cool £440 million.
A control system?
If it was the intelligence services (whether British and/or Russian) that had bank-rolled Pergamon Press, then their motif may well have been to ensure that knowledge emerging following the Second World War was subject to control.
Whilst this might appear, at first glance, to be an outrageous suggestion, events that later occurred in relation to the journal entitled Medical Hypothesis strongly point to a strong drive on the part of the establishment for academic journals to be controlled.
Some facts by way of background
This journal was established by the British-born and educated Dr David Horrobin in 1975 to give novel, radical ideas as well as speculations in medicine open-minded consideration, opening the field to radical hypotheses that would be rejected by most conventional journals.
So in order to meet these objectives, the journal was established with a single editor making all decisions concerning publication, and no review panel involved at all. Dr Horrobin served as the first Editor-in-Chief and Dr Bruce Charlton as the second.
It was during Charlton’s tenure that a cause célèbre occurred and we will return to this once we have sketched in some of Dr Horrobin’s remarkable background, courtesy of Dr Patricia Kane who, in her obituary of him in the British Medical Journal on the occasion of his death in 2003, referred to him as one of ‘our greatest treasures’.
Dr Kane summarised his remarkable achievements thus:
‘Born in England on October 6, 1939, David was a scholar of Oxford where he obtained a First Class Honours medical degree. To this, he added a clinical medical degree and a doctorate in neuroscience. David was a fellow of Magdalen College where he taught medicine to students alongside the father of the field of essential fatty acids, Dr. Hugh Sinclair.
David himself initiated his own research into essential fatty acids (EFAs) in 1972 whilst at the University of Newcastle Medical School and continued this work on EFAs and prostaglandins at the University of Montreal.
He became increasingly fascinated in the development of novel therapeutic agents based on lipid biochemistry and its application to human disease.
David set up a small pharmaceutical company, Efamol in 1979 which several years later became a public company, Scotia Pharmaceuticals Ltd. Over the course of 18 years, Dr. Horrobin’s innovative approach to research led to the discovery of many lipid products for the treatment of disease.
In 1997 set up a new company, Laxdale Ltd. for the exclusive development of novel lipid pharmaceuticals for psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar depression and Huntington’s Disease.’
Dr Horrobin’s personal characteristics were described in equally glowing terms:
‘He had a unique combination of enthusiasm and tenacity, humility and friendliness with remarkable creativity, a huge depth of knowledge and striking analytical power’. So, this is the man with the vision to establish Medical Hypotheses and other doctors weighed in with their praise.
Susan McGoldrick described Horrobin as ‘one of the most original scientific minds of his generation’, a view supported by Dr A.Chaudhuri who, in the obituary that he also penned for the BMJ, stated that Dr Horrobin was ‘one of the most accomplished medical physiologists I came to know personally.’
In 2009, his successor as Editor-in-Chief, Dr Bruce Charlton, accepted an article by Peter Duesberg, a Berkeley virologist who contested the HIV basis of AIDS and argued that theSouth African Government was right not to administer anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS suffererson the basis that the HIV–AIDS link remained unproven.
The publication of this article caused a riot in the scientific world. Scientists associated with the US National Institute of Health (NIH) threatened to have all subscriptions to Elsevier titles removed from the National Library of Medicine if Elsevier did not withdraw this article and institute peer review at Medical Hypotheses.
Elsevier agreed and sacked Dr Charlton from the post of Editor. Charlton has since written that ‘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’.
Strong stuff indeed.
The successor to Dr Charlton as Editor-in-Chief was Mehar Manku and you can gain a sense of his outlook from his own vision of the journal. As he wrote on taking up the post, ‘The idea is to be careful not to get into controversial subjects’, the reverse of what Dr Horrobin had intended and are we surprised that he instituted Peer Review?
Should we be surprised, also, that the official obituary provided by the BMJ was considered by many to be a grotesque distortion of the talents of this remarkable man?
Such is the reaction of a mainstream journal when someone institutes a system that circumvents the normal tools for control.
Peer Review: a tool of suppression
One was the French scientist, Dr Jacques Benveniste, the name behind the view that ‘water has memory’ and the other is British scientist, Dr Rupert Sheldrake whose research called into question numerous aspects of mainstream science.nce.
You can find other examples in the book The Dark Side of Academia: How Truth is Suppressed (by the Secret Professor) but a look at the reception given to the work of these two men will be highly instructive.
For, both men became the object of intense hostility from Dr John Maddox, Editor-in-Chief of one of the world’s premier journals, Nature.
Where Benveniste was concerned, he announced that independent investigators would ‘observe repetitions of the experiments’ and whilst the first ones confirmed the published results the later ones, with different protocols imposed by Maddox, did not.
In reality, subsequent experimentation by Benveniste demonstrated that the biological efficiency of ‘extra-high dilutions’ (EHDs) of histamine increased at first but decreased again after the ninth decimal dilution.
At that point, it dropped and continued to vary in a quasi-periodic way during successive dilutions. Subsequently, in 1993, Benveniste found that two EHDs could perturb each other, suggesting that audible sound waves could not only be involved but also amplified, recorded and transmitted.
Benveniste’s contract as head of a lab with INSERM was not renewed and eventually, following his death in a routine heart operation, it was left to Nobel prize winner, Dr Luc Montaignier, to resume the research.
He actually replicated Benveniste’s findings but, the hostile reaction of the French scientific establishment led him to continue the research in a university in China. The reaction to Dr Rupert Sheldrake’s research on ‘morphic resonance’ was not dissimilar.
In an infamous editorial in Nature in 1981, John Maddox described the first of Sheldrake’s books (A New Science of Life), as an ‘infuriating tract’ and ‘the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.’
Fast forward almost twenty years and Maddox reviewed another book of Sheldrake’s, Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home reports on studies and interviews with around a thousand animal experts.
The book presents copious evidence regarding the psychic powers of birds and animals but this is what Maddox had to say (Nature 1999, 401, 849-850. October 28):
‘Rupert Sheldrake is steadfastly incorrigible in the particular sense that he persists in error. That is the chief import of his eighth and latest book.
Its main message is that animals, especially dogs, use telepathy in routine communications.
The interest of this case is that the author was a regular scientist with a Cambridge PhD in bio-chemistry until he chose pursuits that stand in relation to science as does alternative medicine to medicine proper.’
As the discerning reader will notice, Maddox does not engage with the evidence, merely batting it out of court.
The sweeping hand of history If we follow the thread that leads us from Robert Maxwell. and his institution of Peer Review at Pergamum Press in 1951 to its use to undermine the work and initiatives of such luminaries as Benveniste, Horrobin, and Sheldrake, can we be in any doubt as to the fact that Peer Review can be used to discredit research and researchers not welcome by the mainstream?
Given this, we might want to revert to a world in which Peer Review does not hold sway over academic writing, reverting perhaps to a single trusted editor at the helm (the erstwhile practice at the journal Medical Hypotheses).
Demonstrable attributes would include academic prowess, open-mindedness and integrity.
Header image: Majorca Daily Bulletin
About the author: Gloria Moss (Prof) Is the author of c.80 peer reviewed journal and conference papers as well as 8 books. She has a background in People Management and Organisational Psychology and has been a long-time reviewer for Peer Review journals. She is a strong advocate of evidence-based Critical Thinking and has co-authored the book Light Bulb Moments and the Power of Critical Thinking, written with Katherine Armitage.
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