The decision to run the study, which was based on 8-year-old findings from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, so angered Dr. E. Ratcliffe Anderson Jr., the association's vice president, that he apologized for the appearance of the article, said it was not JAMA's place to get involved in political debates and then fired the journal's longtime editor, Dr. George Lundberg, for bruising the association's reputation.

During Lundberg's 17-year reign, he had made editorial decisions that ticked people off -- like devoting a whole issue of JAMA to that "quackery" field called alternative medicine and publishing "It's Over, Debbie," a physician's account of euthanasia on a cancer patient. Some say it was his fierce editorial independence that ended up getting him canned. In any case, he's credited with taking a journal "that was a second-rate mouthpiece for the association and turn[ing] it into one of the 'big five' medical journals worldwide," according to the British Medical Journal, which also belongs to this exclusive five-journal club, along with the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and Annals of Internal Medicine.

With that kind of legacy, it's probably not a surprise to his former colleagues that Lundberg is back. This month he announced that he's starting his own primary source, peer-reviewed, general medical journal -- challenging the big guns at their own game -- and that he's going to do it exclusively online. "George Lundberg coming up with a new idea is not exactly an earth-shattering story," says Dr. John Renner, president of the nonprofit National Council for Reliable Information and medical officer to the Web site HealthScout. "He is doing that every week."

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