Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of The BMJ from 2005 to 2021 and the first woman to hold the post, has been one of the most consistent high-profile critics of pharmaceutical industry influence on medical science, journals, and clinical practice. She has repeatedly argued that the industry’s commercial incentives systematically distort the evidence base that doctors and patients rely on. In a 2016 interview, she was blunt: “I think we have to call it what it is. It is a corruption of the scientific process.” She keeps a doctor-shaped puppet with strings on her desk as a reminder of those hidden influences, noting that commercial and academic pressures are inevitable and that pretending otherwise is absurd. Patients are harmed, she has said, when unsafe drugs and devices reach the market because of biased or incomplete research. Godlee has also described medical journals as, to a large extent, the “marketing arm of the pharmaceutical industry.” In 2011 testimony to the UK Commons Science and Technology Committee, she stated that journals are largely naïve about the industry’s “extremely dubious” practices and that editorial decisions are often shaped by the revenue from reprint sales of large industry-sponsored trials. “Publishers benefit, but I don’t think science benefits,” she said, and called for far stronger conflict-of-interest rules and transparency. Under her leadership, The BMJ pursued concrete investigations and reforms: exposing conflicts of interest among WHO advisers during the H1N1 pandemic, pressing Roche to release full Tamiflu data (later reanalyses found limited benefit), and supporting the Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT) initiative that re-examined the infamous Study 329 on paroxetine in adolescents, revealing increased harms and lack of efficacy. In a 2019 campaign with other experts, she and colleagues wrote that “endemic financial entanglement with industry is distorting the production and use of healthcare evidence, causing harm to individuals and waste for health systems,” and argued that governments should fund independent trials rather than rely on manufacturer-sponsored ones. Godlee’s consistent position has been that science can self-correct only with transparency, independent evaluation, and a willingness to challenge commercial pressures—not under a blanket of secrecy or financial dependence.