In recent years, The Lancet, once one of the most distinguished medical journals in the world, has degenerated into a bastion of political correctness, thuggery (near-hysterical calls for outright smoking bans) and outright, well, look again at that infamous, and suspiciously-timed, piece on the “100,000″ death toll in Iraq and choose your noun. The Lancet is a disgrace to medicine and a disgrace to journalism.

Now, members of Britain’s scientific academy are hitting back. The London Times has more:

“BRITAIN’S premier medical journal is endangering public health by publishing unfounded scare stories, 30 of the country’s leading scientists say today. Poor editorial judgment at The Lancet has fuelled panic over issues such as the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, hormone replacement therapy and genetically modified (GM) crops, the eminent medical researchers charge in a letter that the journal has refused to publish. The signatories, thirty fellows of the Royal Society, two of whom are Nobel laureates, accuse it of favouring “desperate headline-seeking” over sound science, to the detriment of public health. “Under the editorship of Richard Horton, the publication of badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories has had devastating consequences for individual and public health, in the UK and abroad, and carried a high economic cost,” they say.”

Read the whole thing.