Women’s health champion, Dr Riko Muranaka, awarded the 2017 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science.

Dr Riko Muranaka has been awarded the international 2017 John Maddox Prize for promoting science and evidence on a matter of public interest, despite facing difficulty and hostility in doing so. A journalist and lecturer at Kyoto University, Dr Muranaka is recognised for her work championing the use of evidence in public discussions of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine.

The HPV vaccine is recognised by the scientific and medical community, and endorsed by the World Health Organisation as key to preventing cervical and other cancers. In Japan the vaccine has been subject to a national misinformation campaign to discredit its benefits, resulting in vaccination rates falling from 70% to less than 1%.

Dr Muranaka’s work to put the evidence for the safety of the vaccine clearly before the public has continued in the face of attempts to silence her with litigation and undermine her professional standing. In persisting, she has tried to ensure that a scientific account of the weight of evidence is available not only for Japanese families but for public health globally.

The John Maddox Prize, now in its sixth year, is a joint initiative of the leading international scientific journal Nature and the charity Sense about Science, supported by the Kohn Foundation, and is awarded to one or two people a year. The late Sir John Maddox FRS, was editor of Nature for 22 years and a founding trustee of Sense about Science. A passionate and tireless communicator and champion-of-science, he engaged with difficult debates, inspiring others to do the same.

The judging panel consisted of Professor Colin Blakemore FRS, Tracey Brown OBE (Sense about Science), Sir Philip Campbell PhD (Nature) Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS, Natasha Loder (the Economist). The judges sat in a personal capacity and the choice of the award does not indicate the view of any organisation they are associated with. This year the prize received over 100 nominations from 25 countries. The judges were struck not only by the diverse circumstances in which nominees persevered with communicating science – which may indicate growing recognition among the international research community of the value of engaging in society – but by the often extreme and unsupportive conditions in which some do this. In many of the examples this year, and in previous years, the judges found a lack of institutional support, and in some cases that the behaviour of researchers’ institutions contributed to the problems they faced in public discussion.

As a result, this year the judges have taken the unusual step of drawing attention to the challenges tackled by other nominees (see commendations below) and calling for researchers’ employers, government agencies, funders and scientific organisations to consider what action they should be taking to ensure that researchers are properly supported and the public continue to have access to their discussions about evidence.