A renowned pharmacologist and expert witness in the Primodos drug scandal has been unmasked as a fraud – by his daughter.
Professor Michael Briggs, who was also a NASA scientist and adviser to the World Health Organisation, built his glittering career on lies by faking his qualifications.
The revelations come in a new book called The Scientist Who Wasn’t There, written by his daughter Joanne Briggs – and Sky News can now reveal how his story sheds new light on a medical scandal that has rumbled on for five decades.
From 1966 to 1970, Professor Briggs was UK research director for Schering pharmaceuticals, which made the pregnancy test drug Primodos, sold in the UK with great commercial success.
Later, hundreds of mothers would claim that the drug damaged their babies in the womb – and Briggs was called as an expert witness to challenge their case.
His involvement in understanding the effects of Primodos runs from the 1960s to the current day, and questions remain over whether his research was among a more recent body of work which has been used by the government to justify not setting up a redress scheme for disabled claimants.
Yet, Briggs was a man who faked research.
“When I was small, I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science,” Joanne Briggs writes.
Son of a typewriter mechanic from Manchester, he was an enigmatic figure, often dressed in a blazer and sunglasses. In one old family photo, Joanne says he looks like “an operative from MI5, after he’d been issued with a wife and child”.
Professor Briggs claimed he had advised film director Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
He had indeed worked for NASA on the Mars probe, based at the California Institute of Technology, though Joanne believes he used “a three-card trick” to get the job.
Speaking to Sky News in her kitchen in Sussex, she pulls out two A4-bound books.
One purports to be a PhD thesis from Cornell University in 1959 by MH Briggs. The other is a Doctor of Science degree dated 1961 from Wellington University in New Zealand.
“Both of these documents are unfortunately fakes,” says Joanne, explaining that her father worked for a year as a teaching assistant at Cornell and, at best, did a master’s thesis.
The “super doctorate” from Wellington would have required a real PhD, and Joanne believes he did submit something, but examiners described it as “unfavourable”.
“He had a very contorted CV, that’s for sure,” says Joanne. “He never completed a sustained piece of work leading to a higher degree of the kind that you would expect a scientist to have.”
Professor Briggs’s name cropped up in Sky News investigations into Primodos. First in leaked letters from Schering in which scientists were discussing their concerns about the safety of the drug.
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Read more:
Primodos – the secret drug scandal
Evidence could reveal ‘one of the biggest medical frauds of 20th century’
A paediatrician named Isabel Gal raised the alarm in a paper published in science journal Nature, warning of a higher incidence of spina bifida in babies born to mothers who used hormone pregnancy tests.
Briggs then asked a statistician, Dennis Cook, to see if there was a correlation between increased sales of the drug and malformations in UK newborns.
Mr Cook, who later shared his study with Sky News, wrote to Briggs warning that the correlation was “alarming”.
Yet Briggs didn’t act on this.
He later left Schering, taking up senior roles in universities in Zambia then Australia, but in 1982, when Primodos campaigners attempted to sue Schering for damages, Briggs was a key expert witnesses offering to give evidence on behalf of the company.
Joanne says: “The collapse of the trial has been attributed to him by many people on the campaign side. He appeared to be an expert on a world stage, an incomparable expert.
“He advised the World Health Organisation’s hormone pharmaceutical committee, so you couldn’t ask for a better CV, but unfortunately what was in his CV was largely of his own making.”
Joanne describes her father’s career as “a series of fraudulent acts”.
In the late 1980s he was caught out by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer who found Briggs had been fabricating research for Schering and another company, relating to the safety of the contraceptive pill.
Mr Deer told Sky News: “He was in those days of typewriters, essentially sitting there and thinking of what the data ought to be, and typing it in to tables and sending it off to medical journals to publish.”
Aged 51, Briggs died in mysterious circumstances, shortly after the article was published. But his legacy wasn’t over.
Sky News has found animal studies produced while he was UK research director at Schering were among dozens of studies submitted by the manufacturer for use in an expert working group (EWG) report published in 2017 that examined Primodos for the government.
Twenty-eight animal studies from the 1960s and 70s were provided by Schering, and while a number were produced in the late 70s after Briggs left the company, some of those were outsourced and done in preparation for the litigation in which Briggs was a key witness.
Joanne believes based on the dates and “hallmark characteristics of his turn of phrase” that some of the studies were produced by her father.
“There are research papers there that were actually produced by my dad,” she says. “And they were relied on by the expert working group as part and parcel of their conclusion.”
The EWG report has since been used by government and manufacturers to dismiss more recent claims by campaigners about the drug’s damaging effects.
When asked specifically about one rabbit study from 1970, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which oversaw the EWG, was able to confirm it was not done by Briggs, but asked us to direct further questions about Schering’s studies to the manufacturer.
It added that the MHRA is “committed to reviewing any new scientific data which becomes available since the conclusion of the Expert Working Group’s review”.
Schering is now owned by Bayer, which told us: “In 2017, the Expert Working Group of the UK’s Commission on Human Medicines concluded that the available scientific data from a variety of scientific disciplines does not support a causal relationship between the use of sex hormones in pregnancy and an increased incidence of congenital anomalies or other adverse outcomes, such as miscarriage.”
Responding to specific questions about Professor Briggs, they added: “Backed by the considerable body of scientific research and evidence, Bayer maintains that there is no causal relationship between use of Primodos and an increased incidence of congenital anomalies.”
But they have not told us whether studies by a serial faker were or weren’t used to argue that the drug was safe.
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Joanne hopes her revelations could lead to a rethink about the evidence.
“I think this story about a man in the centre of this who happens to be a fabricated person, a hollow man, who has been relied on to such an extent for his expertise,” she says.
“That doesn’t strike me as irrelevant.”
