Drummond Rennie

Ian Drummond Brownlee Rennie (January 31, 1936 – September 12, 2025) was an American nephrologist and high altitude physiologist who was a contributing deputy editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Rennie was an editor of JAMAevidence, a project for education related to evidence-based medicine sponsored by the American Medical Association. He was known for involvement in reform of scientific publishing and for advocating improvements in reporting standards for clinical trials. He was the director of the first seven International Congresses on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, which he also helped to develop along with JAMA.

Background Rennie was born on January 31, 1936, near Leeds in Yorkshire.

Rennie married Silvia Nussio of Switzerland in 1958, with whom he had two children. He later married data scientist Deborah Peltzman in 1992, who survives him. He died from a stroke in Medford, Oregon, on September 12, 2025, at the age of 89.

Career Rennie attended Cambridge University and received his M.D. from Guy's Hospital Medical School. He described his first contact with serious scientific misconduct in publishing as arising less than four months into his editorship.

He organized the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication (often known as the Peer Review Congress) for several years from 1989, a project he launched after receiving JAMA's support for the effort in 1986. He was president of the World Association of Medical Editors and a founding member of several efforts to improve and standardize the reporting of clinical trial data, most notably the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) project. He received the 2008 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, cited "for his career-long efforts to promote integrity in scientific research and publishing", recognizing "his outspoken advocacy for the freedom of scientists to publish in the face of efforts to suppress their research."