Ben is a [coughs] award winning writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who has written the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003.
He appears regularly on Radio 4 and TV, and has written for the Guardian, Time Out, New Statesman, and the British Medical Journal as well as various book chapters.
“Bad Science” the book (4th Estate) is out now, it’s sold out in many bookstores but the publishers have ordered an emergency second print run which will appear in two days.
He has won numerous awards, including “Best Freelancer” at the Medical Journalists Awards 2006, the Healthwatch Award in 2006, “Best Feature” at the British Science Writers Awards twice, for 2003 and 2005, and the Royal Statistical Society’s first Award For Statistical Excellence in Journalism (£250 and an engraved crystal paperweight!).
I do not present myself as a “leading expert”, and I rarely even mention being a doctor, on the grounds that “arguing from authority” is one of the biggest problems in the way that science is misrepresented by the media. However, if you were to ask my mother, she would tell you that Ben studied Medicine at Magdalen College Oxford where he also edited Isis, the Oxford University Magazine. He left in 1995 with a First: before going on to clinical medicine at UCL, he was a visiting researcher in cognitive neurosciences at the University of Milan, working on fMRI brain scans of language and executive function, worked at Liberty the human rights organisation, and was also funded by the British Academy to do a Masters degree in Philosophy at King’s.
This is what Google thinks about him.
What the blogs say about Bad Science.
You can contact him very easily, ben@badscience.net. Send in your bad science and he’ll write about it.
Ben is 34 and works full time for the NHS in London.
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:
Pat Kavanagh (Literary)
Rosemary Scoular (TV/Radio, although for quick stuff it might be easier just to email me)
unitedagents.co.uk/
12-26 Lexington Street
London, W1F 0LE
t. +44 (0) 20 3214 0800
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 fare, 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. I’m genuinely sorry if your administrative systems can’t manage it, 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.
