Samiran Nundy • Atul Kakar
Zulfiqar A. Bhutta

2022

When I became an assistant editor at the BMJ in 1979 and began to process scientific papers submitted to the journal it was extremely unusual to see, let alone publish, a paper from a low-income country. I remember being surprised by high-quality papers coming from Bangladesh, a country that Henry Kissinger called a ‘basket case’. Those papers came from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, which I learned later was a creature of the Cold War and might cruelly be called a ‘branch office of Johns Hopkins’.