Leemon McHenry

In 2007 he became the literary executor to the late Professor Timothy Sprigge.

In medical ethics he has focused attention on scientific integrity in clinical research. He has criticized the corporate takeover of medicine and the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medicine. This includes dubious claims about chemical imbalance as a marketing ploy for selling antidepressants, direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, industry-sponsored clinical research, and ghostwriting for medical journals. As an example of the latter, he has written articles about GlaxoSmithKline's study 329 on paroxetine and teenagers, and asked that the ghostwritten article about the trial results be retracted by the journal that published it in 2001. In a broader realm, he has argued that the industry-academic partnerships have worsened university research, created increased opportunities for scientific misconduct, and failed to protect academic freedom. This work falls within a new area of inquiry, agnotology, understood as the study of willful acts to spread confusion and deceit.

McHenry received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where he was Vans Dunlop Scholar in Logic and Metaphysics supervised by Professor Timothy L. S. Sprigge. He defended the thesis Experience and relations in the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead and F.H. Bradley, in `1984 by external examiner, Professor Dorothy Emmet, Cambridge University.