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Colby Cosh: The Canadian pediatric medicine researchers who 'made it up'

When doctors publish fake medical news, they should expect to lose the public's trust

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On Tuesday morning, a fresh shockwave passed over Canadian pediatric medicine, which has had a difficult start to the year 2026. In January, the New Yorker published an investigative piece by Pulitzer-winning feature writer Ben Taub. Taub’s article describes a long-running feud between the disgraced doctor Gideon Koren, founder of the ill-fated Motherisk lab at Toronto Sick Kids, and his former colleague and co-author David Juurlink, a Sunnybrook Hospital and U of Toronto pharmacologist.

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Canadians may have somewhat overlooked the New Yorker piece precisely because the Motherisk scandal is so well known here, thanks to widespread newspaper reporting (particularly by the Toronto Star) that exposed the sloppy science of the lab and documented a pattern of scientific and personal misconduct by Koren, who retired in 2015 and forfeited his Ontario medical license in 2019. Motherisk’s bad drug-testing procedures tainted the entire Ontario child-protection system for a decade and led to injustice on a hideous scale.

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