Cochrane Profile - Iain chalmers with muir gray

My name is... [in several languages] [music] >>Narrator: In the mid-1980s Iain Chalmers was in the midst of a project to systematically review randomised controlled trials in perinatal medicine. As this work began to show promise, he shared those insights with longtime colleague and friend Muir Gray. >>Chalmers: It must have been in the mid '80s at some point that Jan, my wife, and I went to have lunch on a Sunday with Muir and Jackie, his wife. >>Gray: We had a lunch one Sunday with our families and I remember walking in Cutteslowe Park up the road here. >>Chalmers: It was around about that time that I’d, with others, begun to see these systematic reviews and meta-analyses of specific obstetric treatments. Might have been things to stop the uterus contracting prematurely, or to give to women who were expected to deliver preterm. And what was really beautiful about these plots, these meta-analyses plots, is that it made clear why people had been misled, depending on which study they happened to have bumped into. Some of them were statistically significantly positive, others weren't. But when you looked at them all together, there was this signal coming out which showed that, in general, the results fell on this side or other of the boundary. [music] Gray: Someone came from Juba to see me. He was a Ugandan refugee working in Juba, which is southern Sudan, and it took three weeks to get transport in the rainy season. Chalmers: I'd been to Juba before in 1965, in fact, so I was quite interested, and he said, and I was telling him about these plots and saying, you know, it really does help to make things clear what is and isn't known and the extent to which you may have been misled by the play of chance. Gray: And we discussed putting a satellite up. So, if you put a satellite up then you could clip a laptop onto a Land Rover battery and the satellite passed — this is going back, you know, 20 odd years, you — when the satellite passes over then you could send them the Lancet, or whatever. So that was the plan. Put a satellite up. Chalmers: To pull down the most advanced and up to date information in the world. In other words, regardless of where they were, in the form of these pictures and diagrams and some text to go with them, no one, it shouldn't be necessary to deny anyone access to these things, so he was thinking about the technology of it. I was thinking in terms of the picture. Gray: Then two things happened, one was Iain had the idea for the Cochrane Centre. And then the other thing that happened of course was the internet. >>Chalmers: So, that suited the way that we were both of us thinking at that time, that this could be something which could be made available very inexpensively all over the world. Narrator: A few years later, in 1993, Iain Chalmers gathered colleagues from around the world to establish The Cochrane Collaboration. Today The Cochrane Library contains more than 5000 systematic reviews accessible online. Gray: This is the old cake factory of a very old Oxford company called Oliver and Gurden. And Iain came and said he’d won the resources to fund a Cochrane Centre, but didn’t have any rent and we took the top floor. And those two windows there. One, two, three along, there’s two side by side, for the first two years the light was on every night, Iain. Probably the first two years was it? Chalmers: Yeah, make a guess. Gray: Yeah, the first two years. Chalmers: We used to work hard, didn’t we? Gray: Well, I never came in. I was on my way back from the pub or the cinema or something, but there the light was on and I sent him a message across the airwaves. So that’s where it all started and that’s where we still are. [music] Chalmers: We're still here. Gray: We're still here, just. [music]