Ben Goldacre

Ben Michael Goldacre MBE 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, 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, it's 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. In addition, Goldacre frequently delivers free talks about lousy science; he describes himself as a "nerd evangelist."

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' Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, joining a project funded by a Laura and John Arnold Foundation grant. 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 analyze the records of 24 million NHS patients to provide detailed risk factors for hospital deaths from COVID-19.

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 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.

Goldacre has criticized anti-immunization 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 hardline critic of the nutritionist Gillian McKeith. While investigating McKeith's American Association of Nutritional Consultants membership, Goldacre obtained a professional membership for 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 criticized Rath's promotion of vitamin pills to people living with AIDS 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 total 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 later in the book and published online in 2009. However, Goldacre continues to cite Rath as a proponent of harmful pseudoscience.