From David Horrobin’s legacies – the freedom to think and to use the head as a primary laboratory

Abstract

David Horrobin’s achievements over decades can be assessed in their entirety only by contemporary witnesses of his work. However, his efforts to foster scientific creativity and progress have impressed many younger people in the medical research community, including myself. Indeed, the journalMedical Hypotheseswhich Dr. Horrobin founded in 1975 (Founding Advisory Board: Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Sir John Eccles, Arthur C. Guyton, Linus Pauling, and Sir Karl Popper) and edited thereafter exemplifies his quest to facilitate discussion of new ideas and to encourage innovation in biomedical research (1). According to David, the ultimate goal of medical research must be to improve patient care. Moreover, ‘‘innovation is so rare, so valuable, and so central to the improvement of patient welfare that innovative articles should be deliberately encouraged and more readily published than conventional ones’’ (2). In this vein, Medical Hypotheses provides an important forum to think, ask, debate and generate new and creative ideas and hypotheses in medicine and the related biomedical sciences. In his editorial preceding the very first issue ofMedical Hypotheses in 1975 (1), he pleaded ‘‘willingly and proudly... guilty to the charge that I shall publish some ideas which seem improbable and perhaps even faintly ridiculous’’. Deliberately, he invited submissions from people who had done no experimental work in the fields on which their hypotheses touched. This open approach made the journal a free vector for anyone to develop and disseminate thoughts in biomedical sciences. To let almost all hypotheses ‘‘see the light’’ was effective because – as he predicted in 1975 – ideas or criticisms of ideas from any person, i.e., irrespective of whatever work the writer may have done before, were open to being ‘‘discussed, experimented upon, vindicated or destroyed’’ (1). Importantly, David encouraged the realization that any scientist’s primary laboratory is the head (3). Einstein can serve as a key example here because he was able to study the universe with imagination and as little as a piece of chalk. While this is a special case, it is to David Horrobin’s lasting credit that withMedical Hypotheses he provided a home for many people to generate new ideas for research and to challenge locked-in concepts in the biomedical sciences. His journal provided the incentive – and public opportunity – to reanalyze and synthesize any combination of existing studies in whatever context in order to arrive at new hypotheses rather than doing new experimental and new observational studies without having exploited and understood what was already there. Finally, with his latest comprehensive work of which I am aware, a stimulating account on biological evolution and as to how lipid biochemistry may have shaped humanity over millions of years, he has left intriguing ideas for future research (4–6). Further to Medical Hypotheses, David’s ‘fat utilization hypothesis’ evinces yet another legacy of a fine writer and thinker. It remains for us to appreciate Dr. David Horrobin’s engagement for innovative ideas to promote patient welfare and public health and to make use of his syndisciplinary insight into a conceivable biochemical evolution of man’s brain and its possible manipulation, in particular with regard – but not limited – to schizophrenia.