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June 30, 2007
Freedom of speech for academic bloggers - a good result
I've previously blogged about Prof. David Colquhoun at UCL being forced to remove his blog from UCL's servers. However, UCL has relented: the blog will be restored, when Prof. Colquhoun has time to move it back. Clearly, this is something to be grateful for - and hopefully all the attention that this issue was getting in the 'old' and 'new' media has played a part.
Another positive outcome of this is that bloggers bit back against the attempt to censor Colquhoun. As the blogger and journalist Ben Goldacre puts it in a piece for The Guardian:
Amusingly, in these democratic times, there are inevitable consequences of trying to silence a blogger - especially when you make a hash of it - and a mass of activity has now grown into what is cheerfully being described as “a festival of Ann Walker”. As the Sciencepunk blog gleefully points out, Ann Walker’s claims are now more famous than ever.
Most have started by trundling through her pieces on a pill-vendor website called Healthspan. In one piece, Walker promotes the idea that neanderthals were not a distinct kind of human, but degenerate and malnourished versions of ordinary humans: buy pills or regress to a sub-human state, seems to be Walker’s message. Yikes. And there’s a handy list of links to the pills you can buy from Healthspan at the bottom of her article. Dr Andy Lewis on the Quackometer blog points out the flaws, but also shows how the “neanderthal as malnourished homo sapiens” argument is more commonly found on quack creationist websites, where biblical literalists don’t like the idea of “evidence that archaic forms of humans existed, quite distinct from ourselves, and that evolution can explain their development from earlier, more ape-like ancestors.”
Meanwhile, Holfordwatch wades in to look at the evidence behind her claims that Ginkgo biloba pills are effective in dementia and cognitive impairment, and Coracle from the Science and Progress blog examines her claims on glucosamine and chondroitin pills. Coracle makes an interesting general point about the patterns that often emerge in trial research on any pill: “Early, and poorer quality trials showed benefit for chondroitin vs placebo, but in later and more robust trials this benefit gets closer to equivalence with placebo.”
This is very good news: not only does Colquhoun get to move his blog back to UCL, but - while some may have hoped to silence critical discussion of Ann Walker's work - there was, instead, a festival of such discussion. I'm very please to have played my own small part in this festival of Ann Walker.
Posted by jon_mendel at June 30, 2007 12:37 PM
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