Marcia Angell, MD, is a corresponding member of the faculty of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and faculty associate in the Center for Bioethics. She stepped down as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicineon June 30, 2000. A graduate of Boston University School of Medicine, she trained in both internal medicine and anatomic pathology. She joined the editorial staff of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, became executive editor in 1988, and editor-in-chief in 1999.
Dr. Angell writes frequently in professional journals and the popular media on a wide range of topics, particularly medical ethics, health policy, the nature of medical evidence, the interface of medicine and the law, care at the end of life, and the relations between industry and academic medicine. Her two books for the public, Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996, and The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, Random House, 2004 (a New York Timesbusiness bestseller) have been widely read and critically acclaimed. In addition, Dr. Angell is co-author, with Dr. Stanley Robbins and, later, Dr. Vinay Kumar, of the first three editions of a standard textbook, Basic Pathology. She has also written chapters in several books dealing with ethical issues.
Dr. Angell is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences, the Alpha Omega Alpha National Honor Medical Society, and is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1997, Timemagazine named Marcia Angell one of the 25 most influential Americans, and in 2002, she won the George Polk Award for magazine reporting.