Ben Goldacre

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Ben Goldacre

OBE
Goldacre in 2009
Born
Ben Michael Goldacre[1]

(1974-05-20) 20 May 1974 (age 49)[2][3]
London, United Kingdom
EducationMagdalen College School, Oxford
Alma mater
Occupation(s)
science writer
and scientist
Employers
Known for
Parent(s)Michael Goldacre
Susan Goldacre (née Traynor)[1]
Awards
Websitebadscience.net

Ben Michael Goldacre

clinical trials.[1][7][8]

Goldacre is known in particular for his Bad Science column in The Guardian, which he wrote between 2003 and 2011, and is the author of four books: Bad Science (2008), a critique of irrationality and certain forms of alternative medicine; Bad Pharma (2012), an examination of the pharmaceutical industry, its publishing and marketing practices, and its relationship with the medical profession;[9] I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That,[10] a collection of his journalism; and Statins, about evidence-based medicine.[11] Goldacre frequently delivers free talks about bad science; he describes himself as a "nerd evangelist".[12][13][14]

Early life and education

Goldacre is the son of

Australian Federation.[17] He has three children.[18]

Goldacre was educated at

Isis.[21]

Goldacre was a visiting researcher in

fMRI brain scans[22] of language and executive function. Following his studies at the Universities of Oxford and Milan, Goldacre studied clinical medicine at UCL Medical School, qualifying as a medical doctor in 2000 with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB, BS) degree.[1][23] He also received a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from King's College London in 1997.[1][24][25]

Career and research

Scientific career

Goldacre passed the

Institute of Psychiatry in London in 2008,[27] and a Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 2009.[28]

In 2012, Goldacre was appointed a

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.[12][29][30][31]

In 2015, Goldacre moved to the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences's

Laura and John Arnold Foundation.[32] In 2022, he became the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of Oxford's newly-established Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science.[6]

As of 2016, according to

PLOS ONE.[39]

In 2020, Goldacre was, with Liam Smeeth, the principal investigator of the OpenSAFELY collaboration which created a software platform to analyse the records of 24 million NHS patients to provide detailed risk factors for hospital deaths from COVID-19.[40][41]

"Bad Science" Guardian column and blog

Goldacre was known for his weekly column, "Bad Science", which ran in the Saturday edition of The Guardian from 2003[42] until November 2011.[43] The column focused on pseudoscience and the misuse of science. Topics discussed included marketing, the media, quackery, problems with the pharmaceutical industry, and its relationship with medical journals.[44][45][46]

Goldacre has criticised anti-immunisation campaigners (particularly followers of

Brain Gym,[49] bogus positive MRSA swab stories in tabloid newspapers,[50] publication bias,[51] and the makers of the product Penta Water.[52]

He has been a particularly hardline critic of the nutritionist Gillian McKeith.[53] While investigating McKeith's membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, Goldacre obtained a professional membership on behalf of his late cat, Henrietta, from the same institution for $60.[54] In February 2007, McKeith agreed to stop using the title "Doctor" in her advertising, following a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority by a "Bad Science" reader.[55] In an interview with Richard Saunders of the podcast Skeptic Zone, Goldacre said, "Nutritionists are particularly toxic because they are the alternative therapists who, more than any other, misrepresent themselves as being men and women of science."[56]

In 2008,

AIDS sufferers in South African townships.[60] Rath dropped his action in September 2008 and was ordered to pay initial costs of £220,000 to The Guardian.[60] As of September 2008, the paper was seeking full costs of £500,000, and Goldacre had expressed an interest in writing a book about Rath and South Africa, as a chapter on the subject had to be cut from his book while the litigation proceeded.[61] The chapter was reinstated in a later edition of the book, and also published online in 2009.[62] Goldacre continues to cite Rath as a proponent of harmful pseudoscience.[63]

Andrew Wakefield

Main article: Lancet MMR autism fraud

Although challenging Andrew Wakefield's views about immunisation, Goldacre repeatedly defended Wakefield against an investigation by The Sunday Times into Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper in The Lancet, prompting criticism from the newspaper's reporter Brian Deer.[64]

Writing in The Guardian in September 2005, Goldacre argued:

The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.[65]

As Wakefield appeared before a General Medical Council hearing in 2008, Goldacre stepped up his support for the research:

I will now defend the heretic Dr Andrew Wakefield. The media are fingering the wrong man, and they know who should really take the blame: in MMR, journalists and editors have constructed their greatest hoax to date.[66]

After Wakefield's falsifications of the data came to light, Goldacre continued to lambast journalists for credulity and sensationalism:

Even if it had been immaculately well conducted - and it certainly wasn’t – Wakefield’s "case series report" of 12 children’s clinical anecdotes would never have justified the conclusion that MMR causes autism, despite what journalists claimed: it simply didn’t have big enough numbers to do so.[67]

Bad Science (2008)

Main article: Bad Science (Goldacre book)

Goldacre's first book, Bad Science, was published by

BMJ) and The Daily Telegraph, and reached the Top 10 bestseller list for Amazon Books.[69] It was nominated for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.[70][71] In an interview in 2008, Goldacre said that "one of the central themes" of his book [Bad Science] was "that there are no real differences between the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry and the $50 billion food supplement pill industry."[72]

Bad Pharma (2012)

Main article: Bad Pharma

His second book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, was published in the UK in September 2012 and in the United States and Canada in February 2013.[73] In the book he argues that:

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure.[74]

Other journalism, writing and appearances

Goldacre contributed to

British Medical Journal (BMJ) on the MMR vaccine,[77] science journalism,[78][79] and related topics.[80][81]

In June 2012, he collaborated with the

randomised controlled trials,[82] and in May 2013, he wrote the foreword to the 'Official Guidebook' of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.[83] In March 2014, he worked on a systematic review of the side effects of statins compared with placebos, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.[22] Although many newspapers that covered the review said that it found that statins have "virtually no side effects",[84] Goldacre criticized this coverage as inaccurate. For example, he noted that the study relied on data from trial reports, which are likely to be incomplete.[85]

Several of Goldacre's articles were assembled into the October 2014 release I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That.[10][86]

He was appointed Chair of the NHS HealthTech Advisory Board by Matt Hancock in September 2018.[87]

Goldacre has also appeared on Geoff Marshall's YouTube channel expressing his love for railways during an episode about the least used station in Oxfordshire, Finstock.[88]

Awards and honours

Goldacre has won several awards including:

References

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  12. ^ a b "About Dr Ben Goldacre". badscience.net.
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  17. ^ "The Science Show". ABC Radio National. 28 October 2008. Retrieved 3 November 2008.
  18. ^ "We blew a car tire in remote bit of Cheddar Gorge last week when a drongo drove at us on the wrong side of the road. Couldn't repair. No phone signal. 3 young kids. Covid. Lovely family stopped and spent an hour driving to signal, phoning AA for us, etc. Lovely people are lovely". Twitter. Retrieved 21 August 2020.
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  20. ^ "Ben Goldacre profile at". Peters Fraser Dunlop. Archived from the original on 8 February 2007.
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  43. ^ Goldacre, Ben (24 February 2015). "What eight years of writing the Bad Science column have taught me". The Guardian.
  44. ^ Goldacre, Ben. (2008). A quick fix would stop drug firms bending the truth, The Guardian.
  45. ^ Goldacre, Ben. (2008). The danger of drugs … and data. The Guardian.
  46. ^ Goldacre, Ben (8 September 2005). "Don't dumb me down". The Guardian.
  47. ^ "The MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science". Badscience.net. 2 November 2005. Retrieved 17 October 2013.
  48. ^ Goldacre, Ben (3 February 2009). "Bad Science Bingo, with Jeni Barnett". Bad Science.
  49. ^ Goldacre, Ben (25 March 2006). "Exercise the brain without this transparent nonsense". The Guardian.
  50. ^ Goldacre, Ben (19 November 2005). "How many microbiologists does it take to change a tabloid story?". The Guardian.
  51. ^ Goldacre, Ben (2008). Missing in action: the trials that did not make the news. The Guardian.
  52. ^ Goldacre, Ben (10 February 2005). "Troubled water". The Guardian.
  53. ^ Goldacre, Ben (7 February 2007). "Brought to book: the poo lady's PhD". The Guardian.
  54. ^ Goldacre, Ben (30 September 2004). "Dr Gillian McKeith (PhD) continued". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
  55. ^ Gibson, Owen (12 February 2007). "TV dietician to stop using title "Dr" in adverts". The Guardian.
  56. ^ Saunders, Richard (6 February 2009). "The Skeptic Zone #16". The Skeptic Zone. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
  57. ^ No way to treat an Aids hero, The Guardian, 20 January 2007
  58. ^ 'Gambia's president may be weird, but Aids superstitions strike closer to home’, The Guardian, 27 January 2007.
  59. ^ 'How money is not the only barrier to Aids patients getting hold of drugs’, The Guardian, 17 February 2007.
  60. ^ a b Boseley, Sarah (13 September 2008). "Fall of the doctor who said his vitamins would cure Aids". The Guardian.
  61. ^ Goldacre, Ben (12 September 2008). "Matthias Rath drops his million pound legal case against me and the Guardian". badscience.net. Retrieved 13 September 2008.
  62. ^ Goldacre, Ben. Matthias Rath – steal this chapter, badscience.net, 9 April 2009.
  63. ^ Saunders, Richard. "The Skeptic Zone #16 – 06.Feb.2009". The Skeptic Zone. Retrieved 14 May 2014. There are bad things happening in medicine and academia but people talk about them, people criticize them, you know, and in the world of alternative therapies, you can be as far out as Matthias Rath and nobody will say a word.
  64. ^ Deer B (12 January 2011). "The medical establishment shielded Andrew Wakefield from fraud claims". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  65. ^ Goldacre B (8 September 2005). "Don't dumb me down". The Guardian (reprinted at badscience.net). Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  66. ^ Goldacre B (30 August 2008). "The Media's MMR hoax". The Guardian (reprinted at badscience.net). Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  67. ^ Goldacre B. "The Wakefield MMR verdict". Retrieved 1 November 2022.
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  72. ^ Ben Goldacre interviewed, The Science Show, Part 2, Australian Broadcasting Company.
  73. ^ "The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal", The Guardian, 21 September 2012.
  74. ^ Bad Pharma, p. xi.
  75. ^ Atheist Bus – Official Website » The Atheist's Guide To Christmas (AKA The Atheist Book Campaign) Archived 8 September 2009 at the Wayback Machine, atheistbus.org.uk; accessed 27 July 2015.
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  83. ^ "Here's my… foreword to the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway guidebook – Bad Science".
  84. ^ Knapton, Sarah (13 March 2014). "Statins have virtually no side-effects, study finds". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 13 March 2014. Retrieved 27 March 2014.
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  86. ^ Belluz, Julia (2014). "Meet the anti-Dr. Oz: Ben Goldacre". vox.com.
  87. ^ "Hancock sets up multiskilled HealthTech Advisory Board chaired by Ben Goldacre". National Health Executive. 7 September 2018. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  88. ^ Finstock – Least Used Station in Oxfordshire, retrieved 27 February 2022
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  90. ^ Goldacre, Ben (8 September 2005). "Don't dumb me down". The Guardian.
  91. ^ "MJA News October/November 2006" (PDF). Medical Journalists Association. 2006. Retrieved 14 August 2008.
  92. ^ "CSI's Robert P. Balles Award Goes to 'Guardian 'Bad Science' Columnist Ben Goldacre". Skeptical Inquirer. 31 (5): 13. 2007.
  93. ^ Goldacre, Ben (1 April 2006). "When the facts get in the way of a story". The Guardian.
  94. ^ Heriot-Watt University Graduations: Honorary Graduates Archived 22 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine, hw.ac.uk; accessed 27 July 2015.
  95. ^ Loughborough University News and Events: Honorary Graduates, lboro.ac.uk; accessed 27 July 2015.
  96. ^ "New Year 2018 – Queens List – Final" (PDF). gov.uk. UK Government. Retrieved 30 December 2017.

External links

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