Marcia Angell (/ˈeɪndʒəl/; born April 20, 1939) is an American physician, author, and the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

Her book, Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case (1996) received critical acclaim.

She is also a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and is an outspoken critic of medical quackery and the promotion of alternative medicine.

[5] Angell was a finalist for the permanent post of Editor-in-Chief, but withdrew as a candidate explaining she was retiring to write a book on alternative medicine.

With Arnold S. Relman, she argues, "The few drugs that are truly innovative have usually been based on taxpayer-supported research done in nonprofit academic medical centers or at the National Institutes of Health.

In the words of Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), “It’s not like buying a car or tennis shoes or peanut butter.” People need to know that there are some checks and balances on this industry, so that its quest for profits doesn’t push every other consideration aside.

But there aren’t such checks and balances.Richard Friedman, director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, and a regular contributor to the New York Times science pages, criticized Angell's views as unbalanced.

In a 1998 NEJM editorial she wrote with Jerome Kassirer, they argued: In 1997, Time magazine named Marcia Angell one of the 25 most influential Americans for that year.