Ben is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.
He has written the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003. It’s archived on this site along with blogposts, columns for the British Medical Journal, and other stuff.
“Bad Science” the book (4th Estate) has sold 180,000 copies, reached #1 in the paperback non-fiction charts, and is being published in 18 countries. Nobody was more surprised than me.
The Placebo Effect is a two-part documentary series he made for BBC Radio 4. The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists is another. He’s appeared on the Today programme a few times, Newsnight, Start The Week, The Now Show, Loose Ends, PM, Quote Unquote, Watchdog, Nightwaves, and some other stuff. You can find lots of it if you dig around on the site, along with lectures, podcast interviews with people I like, and other things, maybe start here. There’s a 3-part documentary series coming for the BBC World Service, and a one-off documentary too, both are top secret.
There are lots of clips of Ben on telly here. If you’d like me to come on your TV show and talk about stuff I know then that’d be great, thanks, please send me an email, ben@badscience.net.
Ben has won various awards, including the Royal Statistical Society’s first Award For Statistical Excellence in Journalism (£250 and an engraved crystal paperweight), shortlisted in the Samuel Johnson and Royal Society literary prizes 2009, the Faculty of Public Health DARE Prize Lecture, an honorary doctorate from Herriott-Watt University (although I was, er, also trained in medicine at Oxford and London), “Best Freelancer” at the Medical Journalists Awards 2006, the Healthwatch Award in 2006, “Best Feature” at the British Science Writers Awards twice, and a few other bits and pieces.
He has given about 150 lectures in various schools and universities over the past couple of years, from Oxford and Imperial, through the FSA, GES and CQC, to a small village in Dorset. He’s trying to say no to these now. If you offer him money for after dinner speaking he will spend it on a web TV project.
This is what Google thinks about him, what the blogs say about Bad Science, and you can contact him very easily, ben@badscience.net.
Ben is 35 and works full time as a doctor, with some not-very-noteworthy forays into academia and medical student teaching.
Twitter:
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/pages/Ben-Goldacre-Bad-Science/26030473910
Miniblog Links:
Upcoming Talks:
www.badscience.net/about-dr-ben-goldacre/upcoming-talks-readings-parties/
Press and Media Contacts:
Agent:
Sarah Ballard (Literary) sballard@unitedagents.co.uk
Rosemary Scoular (TV/Radio, although for quick stuff it might be easier just to email me) rscoular@unitedagents.co.uk
12-26 Lexington Street
London, W1F 0LE
t. +44 (0) 20 3214 0800
If you’ve got my mobile number for some reason and you’re trying to get hold of me I promise that email is really, truly, always faster, ben@badscience.net
Mail:
Dr Ben Goldacre
Bad Science
Life Science
The Guardian
119 Farringdon Road
London EC1R 3ER
Or whatever their new address is. I’m sure the mail gets forwarded.
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Just one thing: I’m very happy to come and do stuff for free, although badscience is just a hobby, and I give dozens of talks like that every year, but I’ve just been doing my tax, and it turns out I’m such a phenomenal loser that I lost over £3,000 last year from giving talks, because I don’t ever manage to fill out those little expenses forms and post them off, because I’m too busy giving more talks for free, in the mess of my life. So I will happily come and give a talk – I consider these things a public duty – but – and you can tell I’m slightly pissed about this right now – only if you will promise to just give me my train and taxi fares, when I arrive, with no mucking about, or else I go to the pub instead. Seriously, some of you have thought this is a joke. It is not. If I have to find an envelope, fill out a form, find your address, write it on the envelope, find a stamp, find the right taxi receipts in the pockets of whatever jacket I was wearing that day, and then the train tickets, and then post them, all to get back the £80 or so that I paid to come to you, to give a talk, then experience demonstrates that I will simply lose thousands, and I already don’t do the things that make money, like readers health advice in glossy mags, so this is becoming a surprisingly serious personal problem. Until some fool decides to give a secretary to a man who looks 14 years old, that’s the deal. No, you can’t book the trains in advance, I probably won’t know what city I’ll be leaving from until that day. I’m genuinely sorry if your administrative systems can’t manage this, what can I say, you’re asking me to take time out of my life to come and do a talk and then you want me to fill out a bunch of forms and envelopes. Seriously, I love giving talks, I’m happy to do it, I am a zealot for evidence based thinking and science, I would take a train to the end of the universe to talk about it, but you guys seriously need to think about reciprocation.
Addendum: Right. Like I said, I’m really happy to speak, but supplemental to the above, I also don’t have time to fill out long registration forms for your conference / festival / departmental visitors, especially not if they’re huge formatted word documents which I have to download, save, open, type into, edit, sign (how?) and then email or (are you serious) post back to you. You don’t need my postcode. If I want you to have my home telephone number I’ll ask you on a date. I don’t get it. Ask me to do a talk. I’ll do a talk. I’m a nerd evangelist. I’d walk to the end of the earth. But send these forms, and I will ignore them. This is to protect you from a very long lecture: people give you their time for free, they spend time preparing, they travel to get to you, they pretend they can work on the train but they know most of the journey will be spent changing on tubes and getting tickets and waiting in Euston, they have busy lives, but they want to help you, and you repay them with a form? A form? Everybody knows that a form is the lowest expression of contempt, you use a form to express the fact that you don’t have time for someone, that your time is more important than theirs, and that’s often true, I’ll fill out a form to get a grant, or a job, or a blood test, but right now, just now, when I’m doing a talk for you, and I was doing it in good spirit, and it was going to be a nice fun thing, right now, you need to fill out my form. I’m writing it now, it will be online soon, and you will be tested on the contents of this paragraph.
