Since his death, Schering has dug out of its archives some of the papers my dad wrote as research director, in the 1960s, to shore up their position in the Primodos argument.
From the time when he wrote them until September 1986 at the latest, when The Sunday Times revealed that he was faking research data on a huge scale, Schering could reasonably have claimed that this was the work of a responsible and conscientious expert in the field of synthetic hormones.
After 1986, that confidence had to be misplaced. Perhaps Schering was still reassured by the fact that, whatever frauds he might have committed, he was still a top-flight scientist with a string of publications and two doctoral degrees to his name.
Nearly forty years after The Sunday Times expose, one or two of my dad’s books can still be found in second-hand warehouses. Nothing he wrote alone should ever be relied on, though it seems, perhaps, that the Expert Working Group did, in 2017.
After the 1986 research scandal, everything my dad had ever written or published was judged likely to be worthless, and none of it is there anymore, in the libraries and specialist collections where it used to be.
In her book, published on 5 June 2025, Professor Michael Briggs’ daughter Joanne will reveal for the first time a previously unknown and an even more disturbing act of fraud than any exposed in 1986 – a fraud that goes to the heart of his role in the Primodos Scandal.
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