Ben Goldacre

Ben Michael Goldacre (born 20 May 1974) is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials, aiming to require open science practices in clinical trials.

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; I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That, a collection of his journalism; and Statins, about evidence-based medicine. Goldacre frequently delivers free talks about bad science; he describes himself as a "nerd evangelist".

Early life and education

Goldacre is the son of Michael Goldacre, a professor of public health at the University of Oxford, and Susan Traynor (stage name Noosha Fox), lead singer of 1970s pop band Fox, both of whom are Australian. He is the nephew of Robyn Williams, a science journalist, and the great-great-grandson of Henry Parkes, politician and journalist who is considered the father of the Australian Federation. He has three children.

Goldacre was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford. He studied medicine at the University of Oxford as a student of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class Bachelor of Arts honours degree during his preclinical studies in 1995 in physiological sciences. He edited the Oxford student magazine, Isis.

Goldacre was a visiting researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Milan, working on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans 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. He also received a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from King's College London in 1997.

Career and research

Scientific career

Goldacre passed the Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (MRCPsych) Part II examinations in December 2005 and became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He was made a research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 2008, and a Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 2009.

In 2012, Goldacre was appointed a Wellcome Trust research fellow in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

In 2015, Goldacre moved to the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford with funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. 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.

As of 2016, according to Scopus and Google Scholar his most cited articles have been published in NeuroReport, the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and PLOS ONE.

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.

"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 until November 2011. The column largely concerned pseudoscience and the misuse of science. Topics discussed included marketing, the media, quackery, problems with the pharmaceutical industry, and its relationship with medical journals.

Goldacre has criticised anti-immunisation campaigners (particularly followers of Andrew Wakefield such as Melanie Phillips and Jeni Barnett), Brain Gym, bogus positive MRSA swab stories in tabloid newspapers, publication bias, and the makers of the product Penta Water.

He has been a particularly harsh critic of the nutritionist Gillian McKeith. 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. 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. 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."

In 2008, Matthias Rath, a vitamin entrepreneur, sued Goldacre and The Guardian over three articles, in which Goldacre criticised Rath's promotion of vitamin pills to AIDS sufferers in South African townships. Rath dropped his action in September 2008 and was ordered to pay initial costs of £220,000 to The Guardian. 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. The chapter was reinstated in a later edition of the book, and also published online in 2009. Goldacre continues to cite Rath as a proponent of harmful pseudoscience.

Andrew Wakefield

Although challenging Andrew Wakefield's views about immunisation, Goldacre 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.

Writing in The Guardian in September 2005, Goldacre argued: