Richard Horton

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Richard Horton, MB BS BSc FRCP FMedSci, is the present editor-in-chief of The Lancet, a United Kingdom-based medical journal. He studied at Bristol Grammar School from 1973 to 1980 and at the University of Birmingham from 1980 to 1986, receiving his BSc in 1983, and qualifying in medicine in 1986. He completed his general medical training in Birmingham before moving to the liver unit at the Royal Free Hospital.

In 1990, he joined The Lancet as an assistant editor and moved to New York as North American editor in 1993. Two years later he returned to the UK to become Editor-in-Chief. He was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors, and is presently a member of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. He is an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a Founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. A book about controversies in modern medicine, Second Opinion, was published in 2003. He is married with one daughter, and lives in London.

Horton made controversial statements at the Time to Go Demo of September 23, 2006, harshly criticizing the American president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair. Not long later, the medical journal The Lancet, of which Horton is the editor, published estimates on the death toll of Iraqi citizens after the US led invasion in 2003, putting it at a total of 655,000. This report was heavily criticized by proponents of the invasion of Iraq for what they claimed was its flawed methodology.^[1]^[2]^[3] Criticism was less heavy from other journals.^[4]^[5] Iraq's health ministry said in November 2006, that between 100,000 and 150,000 people had died since early 2004, based on an estimate of around 100 deaths per day brought to morgues and hospitals.^[6]

Horton had previously been involved in controversy over claims he published in 1998 in The Lancet linking the MMR vaccine with autism [1]. These were later retracted.