John Walker-Smith was born in 1936 in Sydney,Australia,the elder of two children of a urologist.[1] In 1954 he gained a place to study medicine at the University of Sydney,qualifying in 1959.[1]
Early career
In 1961,Walker-Smith released his first publication,and the following year he spent six months at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children,Sydney.[1] After being accepted into a course at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in Hammersmith,London,beginning in the autumn of 1962,he travelled to England as a ship’s doctor.[1] At Hammersmith he became interested in the small bowel under the influence of Sir Christopher Booth.[1][2] In 1963 he joined the Brompton Hospital as house officer,and later became a member of the Royal College of Physicians of both London and Edinburgh.[1]
From 1973 Walker-Smith held academic positions at Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children and St Bartholomew's Hospital,London,where in 1985 he became chair of paediatric gastroenterology.[1][2][3] Around this time,in 1975,he wrote the paediatric gastroenterology textbook Diseases of the Small Intestine in Childhood,noted for being one of the first European textbooks covering in its subject matter in English. In 1995,his department moved to the Royal Free Hospital,where,as professor,he led the inflammatory bowel disease clinic and a growth inflammatory bowel disease clinic.[1][2] There,he worked on dietary treatment of children with food intolerance and Crohn's disease,and showed that exclusive enteral nutrition in children with Crohn's disease was safe.[1] He retired in 2000.[1]
According to his memoirs,Walker-Smith's early life was marked by several incidents that he believes to have led to his career in medicine. At age 14,he fell through a plate glass window,which resulted in a partial palsy of the ulnar nerve,which is noted as possibly contributing to his interest in endoscopy. Before entering the University of Sydney as a medical student,he reported maths as being his worst subject in school,and during his time there had trouble with the practive of auscultation,which led him towards the path of gastroenterology. His first employment out of medical school was as a paediatrician at the Children's Hospital at Westmead (then the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children) in Sydney,followed by a position under Christopher Booth at Hammersmith Hospital.[5]
Walker-Smith is the senior co-author of a now-retracted paper (along with Andrew Wakefield, the lead author) which claimed a unique gastrointestinal condition in autistic children that may be connected to the MMR vaccine. This study is generally regarded as sparking the MMR vaccine controversy.[6]
In 2010, Walker-Smith was found guilty by the General Medical Council of professional misconduct who recommended erasure subject to appeal.[6][7] The misconduct finding was reversed on appeal.[8]
In a statement reported in the book on the fraud by Brian Deer, Walker-Smith said:
My case was related to entirely different issues to those that concerned Dr. Wakefield... Every investigative procedure I ordered was to find out what was wrong with the children.[9]
In his memoir Enduring Memories, published 2003, Walker-Smith defended Wakefield's integrity,[10] and noted that the pediatric gastroenterologists in his department had never claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism, nor that it was unsafe.[5]
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