Committee on Pharmacology. In 1980 he became a member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines and was appointed its chairman in 1993; a position he retained until 1998. He was a member of the Committee on Toxicity from 1989 to 1992, and the Standing Group on Health Technology Assessment from 1993 to 1995. In 1998, he was appointed chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and served it until 2008. Rawlins was chair of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) from its foundation in 1999 until April 2013. There, one of his early roles was the decision not to approve wide use of Relenza for flu. Earlier he had clarified the difference of cost-effectiveness from affordability. In 2010, he helped establish the all-party parliamentary group for Huntington's disease in the UK Parliament, supported by more than 40 MPs and peers. From 2012 to 2019 he was chair of UK Biobank. In November 2014 the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced the appointment of Rawlins as its new chair, succeeding Gordon Duff. The appointment was renewed for a further three years in 2017. Eponymous lectures Rawlins delivered several eponymous lectures at the RCP, including the Bradshaw Lecture in 1986. In 1994 he gave the RCP's William Withering lecture. In it, contrary to the widely held belief that digitalis would unlikely pass modern day licensing regulations, he said of Withering's 1785 An account of the foxglove and some of its medical uses ... "Its contents would do justice to an expert report accompanying a Product Licence application to the drug regulatory authority of any state in the European Union". In 2006 he gave the RCP'S Samuel Gee Lecture. De Testimonio In his 2008 Harveian Lecture, titled "De Testimonio: on the evidence for decisions about the use of therapeutic interventions", while acknowledging the value of good quality trials, he argued that there were also other ways of collecting useful clinical evidence other than only randomised controlled trials (RCT) and he encouraged a range of methods to provide a more holistic evaluation. The lecture called for abandoning hierarchy of evidence at a time when Rawlins headed NICE, the UK's main independent agency whose purpose was to assess scientific evidence of medical treatments. The problem with RCTs, he stated, is that they are too generalised. He pointed out that science includes the not so exact but important "judgement".