Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, concluded that medical journals had “devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” This statement comes from his March 2004 New York Review of Books essay “The Dawn of McScience.” He described how companies sponsor meetings, pay speakers, have communications firms turn the talks into articles (often with minimal or no peer review), and then pay publishers large sums to run them as journal supplements. The result, he argued, is marketing dressed up as science that seeds the literature with weaker evidence used to promote products. Around the same period, in written and oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Health Select Committee (2004–2005), Horton described the journal–industry relationship as “somewhere between symbiotic and parasitic,” noting that it had swung too far toward the parasitic side. He highlighted financial pressures (e.g., companies promising large reprint orders if a favorable paper is published, or threatening to pull papers if criticism is not softened) and listed roughly 10 distorting practices, including: • Manipulation or selective reporting of findings • Bias toward positive results in industry-sponsored studies • Hiding negative or adverse data • Ghostwriting • Lightly peer-reviewed supplements used for marketing • Undisclosed conflicts of interest He stated that commercial sponsorship of research and its intrusion into academia represented “one of the gravest threats to the independent evaluation of new medicines—indeed to the notion of an independent science base,” and that the for-profit motive of the sector clashes with public-health values and independent scientific research. In a 2013 Lancet piece (“Falling out with pharma”), Horton withdrew the journal’s support from industry-linked guidance on doctor–pharma collaboration, saying the document’s claims did not match the evidence on company behavior regarding transparency, medical education, and prescribing influence. His better-known 2015 editorial (“Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”) was broader—arguing that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue” due to small samples, invalid analyses, tiny effects, and “flagrant conflicts of interest”—but conflicts of interest (often industry-related) were explicitly part of that critique. These statements reflect Horton’s long-standing concerns about industry influence on the medical evidence base rather than a single one-off finding.