A highly regarded British psychiatrist who was often quoted by the BBC has been struck off the medical register after it emerged that he had lied about his academic qualifications and had carried out unethical drugs tests on mentally ill patients. Tonmoy Sharma, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, repeatedly added PhD after his name, although he had never completed a thesis. In five major drug studies between 1997 and 2003 he used identical patients in different studies and subjected them to tests which had not been approved by ethics committees. In 2003 he recruited mental health patients over the telephone and without the consent of their doctors.

Following a 10-month hearing the UK’s General Medical Council found Dr Sharma guilty of serious professional misconduct. "Your persistent and wide-ranging dishonesty and untruthfulness, spanning a number of years, together with your lack of insight, is so serious that it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner," said the head of the investigating panel. Dr Sharma denied the charges and insisted that he “believed in ethics in medicine”. ~ Telegraph, Apr 1