Handling scientific fraud

Pearce's editors were not to blame

EDITOR,--In his editorial on the Pearce affair Stephen Lock states that the review of the clinical trial was clearly inadequate.1 He is amazed at the credulity that the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology showed in publishing the trial, on the basis of his observation that over three years Pearce purported to have collected 191 women with a syndrome so uncommon that a major referral centre (unnamed) saw only one or two new …