Ben Goldacre

Ben is a best-selling author, broadcaster, campaigner, medical doctor and academic who specialises in unpicking the misuse of science and statistics by journalists, politicians, quacks, drug companies, and more.

His first book Bad Science has sold over 500,000 copies to date, is published in 18 countries, and reached number one in the UK non-fiction bestseller charts. Bad Pharma, is on bad behaviour in the pharmaceutical industry and medicine more broadly: it is a top ten UK best seller. His Collected Journalism and Papers is the perfect toilet book for a nerd.

In policy work, he co-authored this influential Cabinet Office paper in 2012, advocating for randomized trials in government, and setting out mechanisms to drive this forwards. In 2013 he conducted an independent external review for the Department for Education, on improving the creation and use of evidence in the teaching sector. He is the co-founder of the AllTrials campaign – now supported by over 50,000 individuals, 120 patient groups, GSK, and all major academic and medical bodies in the UK – working towards a concrete fix for the ongoing problem of clinical trial results being withheld. He has given evidence on numerous occasions to multiple parliamentary select committees including the Public Accounts Committee (withheld clinical trials and Tamiflu), Science and Technology (withheld clinical trials, homeopathy), Health (privacy and electronic patient data), and Culture Media & Sport (libel).

Ben is currently a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in the Department of Primary Care in the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow in Epidemiology at LSHTM. He runs the EBMdataLab in the University of Oxford, building fun live tools to create and use data more effectively in healthcare and academia, like OpenPrescribing which has identified hundreds of millions of pounds of cost savings for the NHS, and OpenTrials, the missing index for all clinical trial data and documents.

He has made various documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and The World Service on science, libel, policy, and epidemiology: The Placebo Effect is a two-part series, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists is another. He’s appeared on the Today programme lots of times, QI, Any Questions, Newsnight, Start The Week, The Now Show, Loose Ends, PM, Quote Unquote, Watchdog, and various other things. In the US he’s been on shows such as On The Media and Radiolab.

He has toured theaters and rock venues and given over 300 talks in the past 5 years, from comedy clubs and music festivals to universities and schools, from various government departments to the Hammersmith Apollo, lecturing regularly to audiences of thousands.