Dr. David Egilman, a physician and expert witness who, over a 35-year period, has testified in some 600 trials involving corporate malfeasance, resulting in billion-dollar awards for victims and their survivors , died April 2 at his home in Foxborough, Mass. He is 71 years old.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said his son Alex.
Many medical experts do side business in court, offering their informed opinions on the witness stand and helping to prove or undermine plaintiffs’ claims. But few make it a long career the way Dr. Egilman. He taught at Brown University and ran a private practice but spent most of his time consulting and testifying in as many as 15 cases a year.
He did more than opine from the stand. An avid researcher, he unearthed emails and memos proving that, in many cases, drug companies knew the risks involved in putting a new drug on the market but went ahead anyway.
She provided critical testimony in a class-action lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, alleging that it failed to disclose the health risks involved presented by Johnson’s baby powder and other products containing talc. “Although several settlements have been proposed in the suit, including one for $8.9 billion in 2023, the litigation continues.
The work of Dr. Egilman as an expert witness rubbed some people the wrong way, especially defense lawyers and pharmaceutical company executives, who argued that he was too dogmatic to provide an objective analysis. But Dr. saw something else. Egilman.
“As a doctor, I can treat one cancer patient at a time,” he said during a trial in 2018. “But by being here, I have the potential to save millions.”
His work extended beyond the courtroom: He helped legal teams strategize their cases, and he taught them how to present complex medical data to juries.
“David was a game changer on so many levels,” said Mark Lanier, an attorney who worked with Dr. Egilman for 25 years. “David has helped me with cases where he was testifying, but where he was just giving advice and insight.”
He also pushed for what he saw as pharmaceutical marketing encroaching on the field of scientific research. Writing in peer-reviewed medical journals, he showed how drug companies used tactics like ghostwriting – composing their own studies, then paying a doctor to add their name – and ” seeding,” where companies run their own questionable studies to build support for their drugs.
Dr. helped. Egilman in publicizing a declassified memo from 1950 warning of the dangers involved in government radiation tests on humans. However, tests were carried out.
“If this were to be done to the people, I think those concerned in the Atomic Energy Commission would come under great criticism, admittedly, it would have a bit of the Buchenwald touch,” Dr. Joseph G. Hamiltona professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in the memo, referring to the Buchenwald concentration camp where Nazi doctors conducted horrific medical experiments on prisoners.
The The US government apologized for radiation tests in 1996.
Sometimes, the zeal of Dr. Egilman is more than him. In 2007, he agreed to pay drug maker Eli Lilly $100,000 after leaking confidential documents to a lawyer, who then gave them to The New York Times. He was embroiled in a lawsuit against the company over allegations that it pushed the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for unapproved uses.
Eli Lilly gave the money from the settlement to charity. But the company’s success was short-lived: In 2009, it pleaded guilty to the charges and agreed to pay $1.4 billion — including a $515 million criminal fine, the largest ever in a health care case.
Dr. Egilman is unbowed by the ups and downs of the case.
“A physician’s oath,” he told Science magazine in 2019, “is never to say shut your mouth.”
David Steven Egilman was born on September 9, 1952, in Boston. His father, Felix, was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, including a period spent in Buchenwald, because, he said, his skill as a shoemaker was valued by German officials. His wife and two children were killed in another concentration camp.
After the war, Felix Egilman moved to the United States, where he married Veta Albert, David’s mother, who died in a car accident when David was 10 years old. His father emotionally withdraws in the face of mounting trauma, leaving David largely to fend for himself. of himself.
He won a scholarship to Brown University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology in 1974 and a medical degree in 1978. He earned a master’s degree in public health from Harvard in 1982.
Married Dr. Egilman to Helene Blomquist in 1988. Along with their son Alex, he survives her, as does another son, Samson.
After medical school and training at the National Institutes of Health, he moved to Cincinnati, where he set up a clinic as part of the US Public Health Service. Many of his patients were industrial and mining workers who developed medical conditions after years of working in unsafe environments.
The experience strengthened Dr.’s determination. Egilman to take a stand against medical injustice. He returned to Massachusetts in 1985, where he opened a private practice and began teaching at Brown.
To handle his growing list of legal clients, he set up a separate company, Never Again Consulting, a nod both to his father’s experience during the Holocaust as well as the importance of not letting acquaintances repeat themselves. -terrible Nazi medical experiments.