Latest news with #MichaelBriggs
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My father, the fake: was anything he told me actually true?
Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn't like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life. If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool. But when Joanne was seven, her father abruptly walked out on the family. He'd been married to her dressmaker mother Marion for 13 years when he decided to leave Britain and his job at the pharmaceutical company Schering and start a new life in Africa with a colleague. 'From that point on, I told myself my father wasn't really gone – he was just somewhere else. He was incredibly important and well known, a powerful thinker who had to be elsewhere to do that,' says Joanne from her home in Sussex. She is now 61, but with her mop of auburn curls and impish grin, it's easy to imagine her as a child, dazzled by this larger-than-life character. She describes him as a dapper figure, always dressed in a blazer and pressed slacks, aviator sunglasses enhancing his enigmatic air. 'In one of these pictures I look like a little girl holding hands with an operative from MI5, after he'd been issued with a wife and child as part of an elaborate plan to conceal his identity.' The resemblance was to prove more accurate than she realised. The illusion of a father who was not quite real was only intensified by the fact that, after he left, they would only see him fleetingly. 'He would come to Europe once a year in order to go to the World Health Organization in Geneva. He'd whisk us off to London, to Harrods' toy department, where I'd buy plush toys. We'd eat in fancy restaurants and I could order what I liked,' Joanne remembers. 'After gorging on prawn cocktail and creme caramel for every meal, was it any wonder that these visits always ended with me being sick? Eat what you like for 24 hours, then nothing for 364 days. It was incredibly disruptive. After a while, when I was 11, I refused to go.' In 1976, when Joanne was 13, Briggs was appointed professor of human biology at Australia's newly opened Deakin University. She went to visit for a couple of summer holidays but then didn't hear from him again until she was 22. 'For reasons that were unclear, he had walked out of his job in Australia and moved to Spain.' Then one day in 1986 she received a message saying he was back in the UK and wanted to meet her. He told her that a Sunday Times journalist had interviewed him for a story about his activities but described the potential scandal as a 'misunderstanding, a pack of lies', driven by the jealousy and competition of academic life. With a wry smile, Joanne recalls the morning two days later when she was confronted with a photo of her father on the front pages of not just the Sunday Times but also the News of the World. The latter bore the headline 'Bogus Boffin Is Unmasked'. 'I don't remember any kind of emotion, though my heart was racing as I read it,' she says. 'I'd learned in childhood to step back from strong feelings around this unpredictable parent, to move away and watch.' The Sunday Times exposé by Michael Deer revealed that Briggs had faked research assessing the possible risks of heart and arterial disease in women after prolonged use of the contraceptive pill. This research, Deer said, 'was extensively relied on in drug company advertising to promote the pill's safety claim'. Briggs, he added, had 'admitted serious deceptions in his research', which had been largely funded by two drug companies, Schering of West Germany, for which Briggs had once worked, and Wyeth of the United States. Schering and Wyeth both denied knowledge of the fraud, and said they would no longer use Briggs's research. Other experts pointed out that medical advice about the safety of the pill wasn't based solely on Briggs's research but on a body of work that had reached similar conclusions. Two months later, Joanne received a call informing her that her father had just died in Spain, a week after being hospitalised with delirium. 'He was buried immediately, as per local custom. His wife was the only mourner at his funeral and the cause of his death is not recorded.' Given her father's history of deception, I have to ask: has she considered that he might still be alive? Fortunately, not much fazes her these days. 'I recall a journalist contacted my brother and me as soon as the news broke, with a conspiracy theory that he was either in hiding or had been killed. This never got into the papers, but it stuck with me. Combined with the unexpected and strange nature of what had happened, from the Sunday Times in September to his apparent sudden death in November, the whole thing seemed to need another explanation. I think we both thought for a while he might not be dead or had come to harm related to the scandal. But these days I hardly ever think about the possibility, remote though it is, that my father didn't die at all.' One might sensibly assume that that was the end of the story. And, for the next 34 years, Joanne got on with her life, had a son and became a barrister. But this was far from the final chapter. 'When we were all in lockdown in 2020, and looking for things to fill our time, I was reading the Cumberlege report,' she recalls. Officially known as the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, this looked at how the NHS had responded to women's concerns about a number of medical treatments. Now involved with the legal side of the detention and discharge of psychiatric patients, Joanne started reading the document for her job. 'My interest was sodium valproate, a mood stabiliser included in the review. But then I read about this other drug, Primodos, a hormone-based pregnancy test. 'I'd never even heard of Primodos but it kept popping up,' says Joanne, 'and to my astonishment so did my father's name.' In 2014, she discovered, Yasmin Qureshi, MP for Bolton South and Walkden, had mentioned Briggs in a House of Commons debate about Primodos, which had been manufactured by his former employer Schering. She then stumbled upon a 1992 Nature journal paper, Reflections of a Whistle-blower by Jim Rossiter, who was head of the ethics committee at Deakin University and had been quoted in Deer's Sunday Times article. 'Rossiter was angry about the way he'd been treated by the institution. He accused my dad of being abusive and unpleasant – and, while he's at it, he states that he doesn't believe that my father had a doctorate from Cornell. He suggests that he had made it up, and probably the prestigious doctor of science award from New Zealand University as well.' Joanne was intrigued. The red and blue theses were on a shelf in her brother's study. 'I thought: 'This is easily provable.'' She contacted Cornell University, which did indeed have a publication by 'Michael H Briggs, 1959' in its library. 'But somehow, I felt I couldn't just leave it at that. I contacted the librarian and asked for some screenshots of its pages. I suppose as a barrister I am used to proving things.' The pictures were of a volume very similar to the one in the UK. Almost the same, but not quite. The library version, the real one, isn't a PhD thesis at all – it's labelled a master's dissertation, one you'd write up at the end of a one-year course. And it has an account by her father of how he'd come to Cornell for a year to study for said MSc. He'd made the PhD up. From this point on, everything started to unravel. Further investigations revealed that the doctor of science award was murky as well. Two eminent scientists had rejected Briggs's application – but whether through an administrative oversight or someone acting in a more calculated fashion, somehow it still succeeded. Given that all this happened in the early 60s, the truth will probably never be known. At this juncture, Joanne started telling her friends about everything she had uncovered. 'I told them: 'You know all those things I told you about my dad, the incredible scientist? Turns out he made the whole thing up.' Many of them said I should write a book. When I had 8,000 words or so, I decided to enter the Bridport Memoir prize.' In 2022 she was named as the winner. Now published, The Scientist Who Wasn't There documents her father's extraordinary career as a liar and fantasist, but also explores the impact his actions had on his family. 'Writing the book gave me a much better understanding of my dad as a person than if I had not found out all these things about him. He would have remained a fantasy figure. I'd previously seen him as someone who moved ever upwards from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. Now I see it as a career of repeated flight, of him abruptly moving away from situations where he might get found out and towards lesser-known institutions who were grateful to have him. They thought he was marvellous because he told them he was – it's a classic conman routine.' Briggs did indeed work for Nasa, based at the California Institute of Technology. But Joanne believes the brevity of his sojourn there in 1962 holds the biggest mystery of all. 'He was only there for a year, probably less. I think something must have gone very wrong because that was his fantasy job, he was working on Mars probes. They probably rumbled him.' In 1963, shortly before Joanne was born, Briggs left Nasa and moved back to the UK to take up a research post at Analytical Labs, an animal feed laboratory in Wiltshire. It wasn't an obvious move. 'While researching the book, I looked into this mysterious lab and discovered it was known by another name at Companies House, and that it had never had any connection with agriculture whatsoever.' The company was based at Corsham, a Ministry of Defence base; when her father went to work there, this was also the home of the Central Government War Headquarters, the secret bunker intended to house the government in the event of nuclear war. Is she suggesting that her father was in fact a spy? 'I think of all the theories, it's the one that hangs together most coherently,' she says. 'He had extremely high security clearance because of his Nasa work. Why would you need that to work with animal feed?' In the book, she suggests that the animal feed work could have a link to the government's plans for agricultural capacity after a nuclear attack. Then there's the fact that a few years later, in 1966, Briggs suddenly went to work for Schering's UK research department in the area of hormone research – totally unrelated to either Mars or animal feed. Schering was on the radar of intelligence agencies because unusually, it had bases in both East and West Germany. How has all of this affected her? Joanne is delightful company with a dry sense of humour and, like her father, is a natural raconteur. 'Growing up, there was a sense of almost romantic longing for my father. As an adult, well, I have never been able to watch films like Father of the Bride. I've never been able to tolerate dramas about fathers and daughters. I couldn't face that loss, though I could probably watch one now. I've been married and divorced twice and I'm not currently married. So, my own ability to stay married may have been influenced by my past.' Does she believe her father harmed people? 'That is so, so hard to answer. If you look at him through the prism of fabrication and the identity that he'd created, he was not the scientist who he claimed to be. Would he have been able to make good decisions, or might he have allowed decisions to ride for a little bit too long? Would he have had the confidence to make difficult decisions and carry them out? He probably wasn't the best choice to be a director at Schering, whatever they wanted him to do there. I think that's about as far as I can go.' Does she feel disappointed in him? She stops to think. 'There's a French expression, 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner', which means to know everything is to forgive everything. He was a man who grew up reading science fiction and got the idea that he could be a spaceman, that he could know all of science. And maybe he thought there were people at Oxford or Cambridge that might beat him to it. Maybe he thought he hadn't the time to stand still and prove to everyone how clever he was – that he needed to fake it until he made it. And then he kind of forgot he was faking it.' The Scientist Who Wasn't There by Joanne Briggs is published by Ithaka (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My father, the fake: was anything he told me actually true?
Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn't like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life. If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool. But when Joanne was seven, her father abruptly walked out on the family. He'd been married to her dressmaker mother Marion for 13 years when he decided to leave Britain and his job at the pharmaceutical company Schering and start a new life in Africa with a colleague. 'From that point on, I told myself my father wasn't really gone – he was just somewhere else. He was incredibly important and well known, a powerful thinker who had to be elsewhere to do that,' says Joanne from her home in Sussex. She is now 61, but with her mop of auburn curls and impish grin, it's easy to imagine her as a child, dazzled by this larger-than-life character. She describes him as a dapper figure, always dressed in a blazer and pressed slacks, aviator sunglasses enhancing his enigmatic air. 'In one of these pictures I look like a little girl holding hands with an operative from MI5, after he'd been issued with a wife and child as part of an elaborate plan to conceal his identity.' The resemblance was to prove more accurate than she realised. The illusion of a father who was not quite real was only intensified by the fact that, after he left, they would only see him fleetingly. 'He would come to Europe once a year in order to go to the World Health Organization in Geneva. He'd whisk us off to London, to Harrods' toy department, where I'd buy plush toys. We'd eat in fancy restaurants and I could order what I liked,' Joanne remembers. 'After gorging on prawn cocktail and creme caramel for every meal, was it any wonder that these visits always ended with me being sick? Eat what you like for 24 hours, then nothing for 364 days. It was incredibly disruptive. After a while, when I was 11, I refused to go.' In 1976, when Joanne was 13, Briggs was appointed professor of human biology at Australia's newly opened Deakin University. She went to visit for a couple of summer holidays but then didn't hear from him again until she was 22. 'For reasons that were unclear, he had walked out of his job in Australia and moved to Spain.' Then one day in 1986 she received a message saying he was back in the UK and wanted to meet her. He told her that a Sunday Times journalist had interviewed him for a story about his activities but described the potential scandal as a 'misunderstanding, a pack of lies', driven by the jealousy and competition of academic life. With a wry smile, Joanne recalls the morning two days later when she was confronted with a photo of her father on the front pages of not just the Sunday Times but also the News of the World. The latter bore the headline 'Bogus Boffin Is Unmasked'. 'I don't remember any kind of emotion, though my heart was racing as I read it,' she says. 'I'd learned in childhood to step back from strong feelings around this unpredictable parent, to move away and watch.' The Sunday Times exposé by Michael Deer revealed that Briggs had faked research assessing the possible risks of heart and arterial disease in women after prolonged use of the contraceptive pill. This research, Deer said, 'was extensively relied on in drug company advertising to promote the pill's safety claim'. Briggs, he added, had 'admitted serious deceptions in his research', which had been largely funded by two drug companies, Schering of West Germany, for which Briggs had once worked, and Wyeth of the United States. Schering and Wyeth both denied knowledge of the fraud, and said they would no longer use Briggs's research. Other experts pointed out that medical advice about the safety of the pill wasn't based solely on Briggs's research but on a body of work that had reached similar conclusions. Two months later, Joanne received a call informing her that her father had just died in Spain, a week after being hospitalised with delirium. 'He was buried immediately, as per local custom. His wife was the only mourner at his funeral and the cause of his death is not recorded.' Given her father's history of deception, I have to ask: has she considered that he might still be alive? Fortunately, not much fazes her these days. 'I recall a journalist contacted my brother and me as soon as the news broke, with a conspiracy theory that he was either in hiding or had been killed. This never got into the papers, but it stuck with me. Combined with the unexpected and strange nature of what had happened, from the Sunday Times in September to his apparent sudden death in November, the whole thing seemed to need another explanation. I think we both thought for a while he might not be dead or had come to harm related to the scandal. But these days I hardly ever think about the possibility, remote though it is, that my father didn't die at all.' One might sensibly assume that that was the end of the story. And, for the next 34 years, Joanne got on with her life, had a son and became a barrister. But this was far from the final chapter. 'When we were all in lockdown in 2020, and looking for things to fill our time, I was reading the Cumberlege report,' she recalls. Officially known as the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, this looked at how the NHS had responded to women's concerns about a number of medical treatments. Now involved with the legal side of the detention and discharge of psychiatric patients, Joanne started reading the document for her job. 'My interest was sodium valproate, a mood stabiliser included in the review. But then I read about this other drug, Primodos, a hormone-based pregnancy test. 'I'd never even heard of Primodos but it kept popping up,' says Joanne, 'and to my astonishment so did my father's name.' In 2014, she discovered, Yasmin Qureshi, MP for Bolton South and Walkden, had mentioned Briggs in a House of Commons debate about Primodos, which had been manufactured by his former employer Schering. She then stumbled upon a 1992 Nature journal paper, Reflections of a Whistle-blower by Jim Rossiter, who was head of the ethics committee at Deakin University and had been quoted in Deer's Sunday Times article. 'Rossiter was angry about the way he'd been treated by the institution. He accused my dad of being abusive and unpleasant – and, while he's at it, he states that he doesn't believe that my father had a doctorate from Cornell. He suggests that he had made it up, and probably the prestigious doctor of science award from New Zealand University as well.' Joanne was intrigued. The red and blue theses were on a shelf in her brother's study. 'I thought: 'This is easily provable.'' She contacted Cornell University, which did indeed have a publication by 'Michael H Briggs, 1959' in its library. 'But somehow, I felt I couldn't just leave it at that. I contacted the librarian and asked for some screenshots of its pages. I suppose as a barrister I am used to proving things.' The pictures were of a volume very similar to the one in the UK. Almost the same, but not quite. The library version, the real one, isn't a PhD thesis at all – it's labelled a master's dissertation, one you'd write up at the end of a one-year course. And it has an account by her father of how he'd come to Cornell for a year to study for said MSc. He'd made the PhD up. From this point on, everything started to unravel. Further investigations revealed that the doctor of science award was murky as well. Two eminent scientists had rejected Briggs's application – but whether through an administrative oversight or someone acting in a more calculated fashion, somehow it still succeeded. Given that all this happened in the early 60s, the truth will probably never be known. At this juncture, Joanne started telling her friends about everything she had uncovered. 'I told them: 'You know all those things I told you about my dad, the incredible scientist? Turns out he made the whole thing up.' Many of them said I should write a book. When I had 8,000 words or so, I decided to enter the Bridport Memoir prize.' In 2022 she was named as the winner. Now published, The Scientist Who Wasn't There documents her father's extraordinary career as a liar and fantasist, but also explores the impact his actions had on his family. 'Writing the book gave me a much better understanding of my dad as a person than if I had not found out all these things about him. He would have remained a fantasy figure. I'd previously seen him as someone who moved ever upwards from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. Now I see it as a career of repeated flight, of him abruptly moving away from situations where he might get found out and towards lesser-known institutions who were grateful to have him. They thought he was marvellous because he told them he was – it's a classic conman routine.' Briggs did indeed work for Nasa, based at the California Institute of Technology. But Joanne believes the brevity of his sojourn there in 1962 holds the biggest mystery of all. 'He was only there for a year, probably less. I think something must have gone very wrong because that was his fantasy job, he was working on Mars probes. They probably rumbled him.' In 1963, shortly before Joanne was born, Briggs left Nasa and moved back to the UK to take up a research post at Analytical Labs, an animal feed laboratory in Wiltshire. It wasn't an obvious move. 'While researching the book, I looked into this mysterious lab and discovered it was known by another name at Companies House, and that it had never had any connection with agriculture whatsoever.' The company was based at Corsham, a Ministry of Defence base; when her father went to work there, this was also the home of the Central Government War Headquarters, the secret bunker intended to house the government in the event of nuclear war. Is she suggesting that her father was in fact a spy? 'I think of all the theories, it's the one that hangs together most coherently,' she says. 'He had extremely high security clearance because of his Nasa work. Why would you need that to work with animal feed?' In the book, she suggests that the animal feed work could have a link to the government's plans for agricultural capacity after a nuclear attack. Then there's the fact that a few years later, in 1966, Briggs suddenly went to work for Schering's UK research department in the area of hormone research – totally unrelated to either Mars or animal feed. Schering was on the radar of intelligence agencies because unusually, it had bases in both East and West Germany. How has all of this affected her? Joanne is delightful company with a dry sense of humour and, like her father, is a natural raconteur. 'Growing up, there was a sense of almost romantic longing for my father. As an adult, well, I have never been able to watch films like Father of the Bride. I've never been able to tolerate dramas about fathers and daughters. I couldn't face that loss, though I could probably watch one now. I've been married and divorced twice and I'm not currently married. So, my own ability to stay married may have been influenced by my past.' Does she believe her father harmed people? 'That is so, so hard to answer. If you look at him through the prism of fabrication and the identity that he'd created, he was not the scientist who he claimed to be. Would he have been able to make good decisions, or might he have allowed decisions to ride for a little bit too long? Would he have had the confidence to make difficult decisions and carry them out? He probably wasn't the best choice to be a director at Schering, whatever they wanted him to do there. I think that's about as far as I can go.' Does she feel disappointed in him? She stops to think. 'There's a French expression, 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner', which means to know everything is to forgive everything. He was a man who grew up reading science fiction and got the idea that he could be a spaceman, that he could know all of science. And maybe he thought there were people at Oxford or Cambridge that might beat him to it. Maybe he thought he hadn't the time to stand still and prove to everyone how clever he was – that he needed to fake it until he made it. And then he kind of forgot he was faking it.' The Scientist Who Wasn't There by Joanne Briggs is published by Ithaka (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Times
21-06-2025
- Science
- Times
My famous father — the fraudulent, fantasist scientist
'When I was small,' Joanne Briggs writes touchingly. 'I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science.' Michael Briggs had all but disappeared from her life in the early 1970s when she was seven after walking out on her mother, but she would correct anyone who showed pity for her as a fatherless child. Dad hadn't gone, she would tell them, he was just in another country being a very famous scientist in the fields of space, and poisons, and having babies. 'Anything you can think of, really, he's an expert in it.' She wasn't the only one to have this inflated view of her father's expertise. Indeed, the scientific establishment shared it, at least for a while. Michael was a Nasa space scientist turned pharmacologist, a renowned specialist in biochemistry, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and a university dean of sciences. He had written papers on topics ranging from human hormones to meteorites and intergalactic travel. The son of a typewriter mechanic from Manchester, he was a self-made man, bouncing round the world from Australia to Pasadena, taking on ever more prestigious positions, pushing at the boundaries of the scientific imagination and 'grabbing hold of everything the Jet Age had to offer'.
Time of India
06-06-2025
- Automotive
- Time of India
Nidec inaugurates new manufacturing Orchard Hub campus in Hubli, Karnataka, celebrates next step in India growth strategy
Nidec Corporation ('Nidec'), the world's leading manufacturer of electric motors, generators, renewable energy solutions, and industrial machinery, proudly inaugurated its cutting-edge manufacturing campus, Orchard Hub, located in the Kotur-Belur Industrial Area of Hubli-Dharwad, Karnataka. The inauguration marks the launch of plant machinery and equipment installation across the six campus plants, paving the way for production to commence later this year. The inauguration ceremony was attended by Mr. M. B. Patil, Honourable Cabinet Minister for Large & Medium Industries and Infrastructure Development, Government of Karnataka, along with Mr. Michael Briggs, President of Nidec Motion & Energy. With Mr. Nakane Tsutomu, Consul General of Japan in Bangalore and Mr. Marc Lamy, Consul General of France in Bangalore, also in attendance, the milestone celebrated Orchard Hub's significance at both regional and international levels. The completion of the Orchard Hub campus is a major achievement in Nidec's commitment to strengthening its presence in India. As Nidec's eighth and largest Indian manufacturing facility, the 50-acre campus underscores Nidec's dedication to supporting the region's industrial development and India's broader economic ambitions. The project's groundbreaking ceremony was held in September 2023, and the campus was completed in just 20 months—a testament to meticulous planning and efficient execution. With the inauguration now complete, Nidec will begin the installation of plant machinery and equipment, with production expected to commence later this year. The Orchard Hub campus will serve multiple high-growth markets as the key manufacturing hub for generators for data centers, wind turbine generators and battery energy storage systems (BESS) for renewable energy, electric vehicle motors, controllers, and EV chargers for clean mobility, and high-efficiency motors, drives, system solutions across various business verticals. Equipped with advanced automation and built on Nidec's 3Q6S lean manufacturing principles, the facility is dedicated to delivering best-in-class products that support customers globally. Strategically located, the campus aims to deliver innovative solutions to both domestic and international markets, with a strong emphasis on exceptional customer service. In line with its sustainability goals, Nidec plans to make the Orchard Hub campus carbon-neutral by 2028 through the adoption of solar power, in-house microgrid systems, and BESS technologies. The facility is expected to create over 1,000 direct and 1,000 indirect employment opportunities in the region. Recruitment drives are already underway to hire diploma and ITI students from institutions in and around Hubli-Dharwad, as the company prepares to launch production. Speaking at the event, Nidec Motion & Energy President Michael Briggs expressed his confidence and optimism: 'India's robust economic growth presents exceptional opportunities for forward-thinking companies, and Nidec is proud to be an integral part of this momentum. Under the visionary leadership of our founder, Mr. Shigenobu Nagamori, we continue to expand our presence across the country. Nidec remains deeply committed to India's progress. Mr. Nagamori's visionary leadership has been instrumental in bringing the Orchard Hub to life, demonstrating Nidec's dedication to shaping India's growth story.' 'With an investment of $55 million, the Orchard Hub project serves as a cornerstone of our 'India for India' and 'India for Exports' strategy. The inauguration of the Orchard Hub Campus marks not only a significant milestone in this endeavour but also a defining chapter in Nidec's journey in India. This facility represents more than an investment in infrastructure; it reflects our commitment to people, innovation, and enduring partnerships. The Orchard Hub stands as a testament to our vision of fostering local innovation, generating employment, and delivering sustainable, zero-emission solutions tailored to India's unique needs.' President and Country Managing Director Girish D Kulkarni added: 'We are proud to establish our new state-of-the-art facility in Hubli, Karnataka, as a testament to our long-term commitment to the Indian market. This campus is not merely a physical space - It represents the future of Nidec in India: a hub for innovation, collaboration, and excellence. This marks an exciting time for all of us, and I extend my heartfelt gratitude to our dedicated teams and to the Government of Karnataka for their unwavering support. We look forward to working together as we continue contributing to the sustainable development of the region.' With the launch of Orchard Hub, Nidec strengthens its global manufacturing footprint while aligning with India's 'Make in India' and 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' initiatives. This development reinforces the company's role in advancing sustainable industrial growth both in India and worldwide. About Nidec Corporation Nidec Corporation is the world's leading electric motor manufacturer with 2024 revenues of over $17B. Founded in 1973 and headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, Nidec is a global company comprised of over 300 group companies and 100,000 employees with operations in more than 40 countries. A pioneer in electrification, Nidec is integral as a world-class global technology provider, localised manufacturer, and development partner in industries ranging from information technology, automotive, appliance, commercial, and industrial machinery. Nidec enables positive global change through innovative problem-solving. For more information, visit Nidec's website About Nidec Motion & Energy Nidec Motion & Energy, a Business Unit of Nidec Corporation, is a trusted development partner in multiple high-growth spaces including industrial automation, vehicle electrification and electrical infrastructure, providing world-class technology, support, and localised manufacturing to support industry leaders across the globe. With headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, it employs over 13,000 individuals around the world in more than 40 countries. Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of Nidec Industrial Automation India Private Limited by Times Internet's Spotlight team.
Telegraph
05-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
The man who orchestrated a British medical scandal
Joanne Briggs's debut, The Scientist Who Wasn't There, is an astonishingly original memoir about truth, identity and the ethics of science. It's thrilling, unsettling – and really rather odd. Winner of the inaugural Bridport Prize for Memoir in 2023, the award that cinched the book's publication, it explores the enigmatic – if not completely bizarre – life of Briggs's father, Professor Michael Briggs, a man whose illustrious, globe-trotting scientific career concealed a vast labyrinth of deception. Born in Manchester, Professor Briggs became a research scientist who worked at NASA, an advisor to the World Health Organisation, and a successful executive in the pharmaceutical industry. On paper, his was a classic rags-to-riches story: he was a self-made, charismatic visionary who surfed the post-war technology boom. But in 1986, his career imploded when a Sunday Times exposé linked him to the hormone pregnancy test Primodos, which worked by triggering menstruation in non-pregnant women, and was alleged to have caused serious birth defects. It seemed Professor Briggs had been faking results. Things get stranger. Professor Briggs not only appears to have forged his qualifications, laundered research funds and bullied sceptical colleagues and anyone who doubted him – he may also have been a spy. He appears to have worked for the British government, possibly connected to Cold War intelligence gathering; may have been involved in espionage in East Berlin, and then somehow got caught up in the making of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. His death abroad, aged 51, was so sudden that Briggs speculates that there may have been some kind of cover-up. What begins, then, as a daughter's ostensibly simple search for the truth about her absent father, soon becomes a forensic and yet also fantastical investigation – part legal inquiry, part philosophical meditation. A trained lawyer, Briggs approaches the evidence as a prosecutor would: poring over professional records, interviewing colleagues and meeting with the victims of her father's lies and misconduct. Primodos involved high doses of synthetic hormones and though the causal link has never been confirmed, women who used it reported children with defects such as spina bifida, limb abnormalities, and heart issues. Briggs reveals that her father manipulated or suppressed data about these effects while being professionally involved with the pharmaceutical company producing it. But the book is also wildly surreal: Briggs imagines conversations with her father in which they debate the boundaries between science and science fiction, and the book eventually resolves into musings and reverie. The overall effect, frankly, is dizzying – pleasantly so. Briggs often hints that she herself doesn't know the difference between fact and fantasy; in a rather cryptic, ambivalent author's note, she writes: 'My memory of the past is as much made up of dreams, impressions, false beliefs, fantasies, feelings and notions as it is of facts [...] which I hope makes my memoir authentic. But is that a true story? Well, yes, it is to me.' True or not, the book defies neat categorisation. It's certainly a book about a very peculiar, unsavoury man, but it's also a vivid depiction of a world in which ambition and imagination collide, with devastating human consequences. Briggs does, at various points, express deep moral ambivalence about writing the book: she wrestles with the ethics of exposing her father's legacy, particularly given the trauma already borne by his victims. She describes a childhood overshadowed by confusion, secrecy and emotional neglect, but also moments of awe and admiration for her father. Their relationship, as reconstructed here, was fraught and complex – marked more by absence than presence, but never entirely devoid of connection or longing. The Scientist Who Wasn't There is not only an indictment of one man's lies and deceit and his descent into moral oblivion, therefore, but a study of duplicity; personal, institutional, even national and international. Briggs slowly assembles a counterbalanced, complex kind of truth, one that acknowledges the impossibility of total objectivity but which nonetheless insists on the value of the attempt. 'He only ever travelled in one direction,' Briggs writes of her father. 'Forwards, away from the smoke of burning bridges.' She, in contrast, with admirable insight and considerable nerve, turns back – to sift through the still smouldering ruins.
