The paediatrician David Southall, who was struck off by the General Medical Council last December, faced a further GMC disciplinary panel last week into accusations that he and two colleagues conducted ethically flawed research on premature babies.

Drs Southall, Stephen Spencer, and Martin Samuels conducted research in the early 1990s at North Staffordshire Hospital into the ventilation technique known as continuous negative extrathoracic pressure. The findings, which were published in Pediatrics, concluded that the technique reduced the incidence of chronic lung disease but was associated with an increase in mortality that was “not …