Gideon Koren

Gideon Koren, FACMT, FRCP(C) (Hebrew: גדעון קורן; born August 27, 1947, in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli-Canadian pediatrician, clinical pharmacologist, toxicologist, and a composer of Israeli folk music. He was a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor at the University of Toronto. In 1985, Koren founded the Motherisk Program in Toronto, which was later shut down amid controversy.^[1] Furthermore, multiple scientific papers authored by Koren have been subject to concerns regarding academic and research misconduct, leading to the retraction of six research articles and editorial expression of concerns on multiple others.^[2] Koren currently has relinquished his licence to practice medicine due to an ongoing investigation into whether he committed “professional misconduct or was incompetent” while he was in charge of the Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory.^[3]

Koren is perhaps best known for multiple scientific and public scandals. He was at the centre of the Motherisk scandal^[4] which has thrown into doubt the findings of 16,000 child protection cases and six criminal cases. An independent review found that neither the laboratory's director, clinical toxicologist Gideon Koren, nor his staff, had the qualifications or expertise to do the kind of forensic work that was performed.^[5] Even before this scandal came to light, Koren was officially reprimanded by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons for writing harassing anonymous letters to Nancy Olivieri and three other colleagues, about which he then lied repeatedly to conceal his responsibility. On December 16, 2018, an investigative article in The Toronto Star uncovered a series of problems in the research papers authored by Koren, including that some papers "[were] inadequately peer-reviewed, fail to declare, perhaps even obscure, conflicts of interest and, in a handful of cases, contain lies about the methodology", leading to the retraction of five research articles and editorial expression of concerns on multiple others.^[2][6]