Ben Goldacre | |
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Born | Ben Michael Goldacre [1] 20 May 1974 [2] [3] London, United Kingdom |
Education | Magdalen College School, Oxford |
Alma mater |
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Occupation(s) | Author, journalist, physician, science writer and scientist |
Employers | |
Known for |
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Parent(s) | Michael Goldacre Susan Goldacre [1] |
Awards | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Epidemiology Clinical Informatics Evidence Based Medicine Reproducibility [6] |
Website | www |
Ben Michael Goldacre OBE (born 20 May 1974) [1] [2] [3] 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. [7] He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials, [4] aiming to require open science practices in clinical trials. [1] [8] [9] [10] [11]
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; [12] I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That, [13] a collection of his journalism; and Statins, about evidence-based medicine. [14] Goldacre frequently delivers free talks about bad science; he describes himself as a "nerd evangelist". [15] [16] [17]
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. [18] [19] 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. [20] He has three children. [21]
Goldacre was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford. [22] He studied medicine at the University of Oxford as a student of Magdalen College, Oxford, [1] where he obtained a first-class Bachelor of Arts honours degree during his preclinical studies in 1995 in physiological sciences. [1] [23] He edited the Oxford student magazine, Isis . [24]
Goldacre was a visiting researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Milan, working on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans [25] 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. [1] [26] He also received a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from King's College London in 1997. [1] [27] [28]
Goldacre passed the Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (MRCPsych) Part II examinations in December 2005 [1] and became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. [29] He was made a research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in 2008, [30] and a Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 2009. [31]
In 2012, Goldacre was appointed a Wellcome Trust research fellow in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. [15] [32] [33] [34]
In 2015, Goldacre moved to the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, joining a project funded by a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. [35] 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. [7]
As of 2016, according to Scopus [36] [37] and Google Scholar [6] his most cited articles [38] have been published in NeuroReport , [39] the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology , [25] the British Medical Journal , [40] The Lancet , [41] and PLOS ONE . [42]
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. [43] [44]
Goldacre was known for his weekly column, "Bad Science", which ran in the Saturday edition of The Guardian from 2003 [45] until November 2011. [46] 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. [47] [48] [49]
Goldacre has criticised anti-immunisation campaigners (particularly followers of Andrew Wakefield such as Melanie Phillips [50] and Jeni Barnett), [51] Brain Gym, [52] bogus positive MRSA swab stories in tabloid newspapers, [53] publication bias, [54] and the makers of the product Penta Water. [55]
He has been a particularly harsh critic of the nutritionist Gillian McKeith. [56] 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. [57] 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. [58] 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." [59]
In 2008, Matthias Rath, a vitamin entrepreneur, sued Goldacre and The Guardian over three articles, [60] [61] [62] in which Goldacre criticised Rath's promotion of vitamin pills to AIDS sufferers in South African townships. [63] Rath dropped his action in September 2008 and was ordered to pay initial costs of £220,000 to The Guardian. [63] 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. [64] The chapter was reinstated in a later edition of the book, and also published online in 2009. [65] Goldacre continues to cite Rath as a proponent of harmful pseudoscience. [66]
Although challenging Andrew Wakefield's views about immunisation, Goldacre repeatedly 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. [67]
Writing in The Guardian in September 2005, Goldacre argued:
The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data. [68]
After Wakefield's falsifications of the data came to light, Goldacre continued to lambast journalists for credulity and sensationalism:
Even if it had been immaculately well conducted - and it certainly wasn’t – Wakefield’s "case series report" of 12 children’s clinical anecdotes would never have justified the conclusion that MMR causes autism, despite what journalists claimed: it simply didn’t have big enough numbers to do so. [69]
Goldacre's first book, Bad Science, was published by Fourth Estate in September 2008. [70] The book contains extended and revised versions of many of his Guardian columns. It was positively reviewed by the British Medical Journal ( BMJ ) and The Daily Telegraph , and reached the Top 10 bestseller list for Amazon Books. [71] It was nominated for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize. [72] [73] In an interview in 2008, Goldacre said that "one of the central themes" of his book [Bad Science] was "that there are no real differences between the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry and the $50 billion food supplement pill industry." [74]
His second book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, was published in the UK in September 2012 and in the United States and Canada in February 2013. [75] In the book he argues that:
Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. [76]
Goldacre contributed to The Atheist's Guide to Christmas (2009), a charity book featuring essays and anecdotes from 42 well-known atheists and apatheists, on the subject of "the power of ideas". [77] He describes himself as an apatheist. [78] He also wrote the foreword to a reissue of Testing Treatments: Better Research for Better Healthcare by Imogen Evans, Hazel Thornton, Iain Chalmers and Paul Glasziou, published by Pinter & Martin in March 2010. He has had several articles published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on the MMR vaccine, [79] science journalism, [80] [81] and related topics. [82] [83]
In June 2012, he collaborated with the Behavioural Insights Team of the UK government on a policy paper on the use of randomised controlled trials, [84] and in May 2013, he wrote the foreword to the 'Official Guidebook' of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. [85] In March 2014, he worked on a systematic review of the side effects of statins compared with placebos, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology . [25] Although many newspapers that covered the review said that it found that statins have "virtually no side effects", [86] Goldacre criticized this coverage as inaccurate. For example, he noted that the study relied on data from trial reports, which are likely to be incomplete. [87]
Several of Goldacre's articles were assembled into the October 2014 release I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That. [13] [88]
He was appointed Chair of the NHS HealthTech Advisory Board by Matt Hancock in September 2018. [89]
Goldacre has also appeared on Geoff Marshall's YouTube channel expressing his love for railways during an episode about the least used station in Oxfordshire, Finstock. [90]
Goldacre has won several awards including:
A placebo is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value. Common placebos include inert tablets, inert injections, sham surgery, and other procedures.
Statins are a class of medications that lower cholesterol. They are prescribed typically to people who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease.
David HealyFRCPsych, a professor of psychiatry at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, is a psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist and author. His main areas of research are the contribution of antidepressants to suicide, conflict of interest between pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine, and the history of pharmacology. Healy has written more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other articles, and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era, The Creation of Psychopharmacology, The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1–3, Let Them Eat Prozac and Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder.
Brian Deer is a British investigative journalist, best known for inquiries into the drug industry, medicine, and social issues for The Sunday Times. Deer's investigative nonfiction book The Doctor Who Fooled the World, an exposé on disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield and the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, was published in September 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Matthias Rath is a doctor, businessman, and vitamin salesman. He earned his medical degree in Germany. Rath claims that a program of nutritional supplements, including formulations that he sells, can treat or cure diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV/AIDS. These claims are not supported by any reliable medical research. Rath runs the Dr. Rath Health Foundation, has been closely associated with Health Now, Inc., and founded the Dr. Rath Research Institute.
Patrick Holford is a British author and entrepreneur who endorses a range of vitamin tablets. As an advocate of alternative nutrition and diet methods, he appears regularly on television and radio in the UK and abroad. He has 36 books in print in 29 languages. His business career promotes a wide variety of alternative medical approaches such as orthomolecular medicine, many of which are considered pseudoscientific by mainstream science and medicine.
Claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have been extensively investigated and found to be false. The link was first suggested in the early 1990s and came to public notice largely as a result of the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, characterised as "perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". The fraudulent research paper, authored by Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet, falsely claimed the vaccine was linked to colitis and autism spectrum disorders. The paper was retracted in 2010 but is still cited by anti-vaccine activists.
Sir Rory Edwards Collins FMedSci FRS is a British physician who is Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Clinical Trial Service Unit within the University of Oxford, the head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. His work has been in the establishment of large-scale epidemiological studies of the causes, prevention and treatment of heart attacks, other vascular disease, and cancer, while also being closely involved in developing approaches to the combination of results from related studies ("meta-analyses"). Since September 2005, he has been the Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of the UK Biobank, a prospective study of 500,000 British people aged 40–69 at recruitment.
Peter Christian Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, medical researcher, and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and has written numerous reviews for the organization. His membership in Cochrane was terminated by its Governing Board of Trustees on 25 September 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gøtzsche was criticised for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British fraudster, discredited academic, anti-vaccine activist, and former physician.
Peter Antony Goodwin Fisher, FRCP was an English physician who served as physician to Queen Elizabeth II for 17 years.
Bad Science is a book written by Ben Goldacre which criticises certain physicians and the media for a lack of critical thinking and misunderstanding of evidence and statistics which is detrimental to the public understanding of science. In Bad Science, Goldacre explains basic scientific principles to demonstrate the importance of robust research methods, experimental design, and analysis to make informed judgements and conclusions of evidence-based medicine. Bad Science is described as an engaging and inspirational book, written in simple language and occasional humour, to effectively explain academic concepts to the reader.
Timothy "Tim" Prager, is a British television and film writer.
Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients is a book by the British physician and academic Ben Goldacre about the pharmaceutical industry, its relationship with the medical profession, and the extent to which it controls academic research into its own products. It was published in the UK in September 2012 by the Fourth Estate imprint of HarperCollins, and in the United States in February 2013 by Faber and Faber.
AllTrials is a project advocating that clinical research adopt the principles of open research. The project summarizes itself as "All trials registered, all results reported": that is, all clinical trials should be listed in a clinical trials registry, and their results should always be shared as open data.
Big Pharma conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories that claim that pharmaceutical companies as a whole, especially big corporations, act in dangerously secretive and sinister ways that harm patients. This includes concealing effective treatments, perhaps even to the point of intentionally causing and/or worsening a wide range of diseases, in the pursuit of higher profits and/or other nefarious goals. The general public supposedly lives in a state of ignorance, according to such claims.
Hear the Silence is a 2003 semi-fictional TV drama based around the discredited idea of a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism. By then, a contentious issue, the supposed connection originated in a paper by Andrew Wakefield published in 1998. The film debuted on 15 December 2003 at 9 pm on the British network Five. Produced on a budget of £1 million, it stars Hugh Bonneville as Wakefield and Juliet Stevenson as Christine Shields, a fictional mother who discovers the possible MMR-autism link when her son is diagnosed as autistic.
The Lancet MMR autism fraud centered on the publication in February 1998 of a fraudulent research paper titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" in the Lancet. The paper, authored by now discredited and deregistered Andrew Wakefield, and twelve coauthors, falsely claimed causative links between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and colitis and between colitis and autism. The fraud involved data selection, data manipulation, and two undisclosed conflicts of interest. It was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield being struck off the UK medical register three months later. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to US$43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for a non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival vaccine at the time, and he had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers.
Extensive investigation into vaccines and autism spectrum disorder has shown that there is no relationship between the two, causal or otherwise, and that vaccine ingredients do not cause autism. The American scientist Peter Hotez researched the growth of the false claim and concluded that its spread originated with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper, and that no prior paper supports a link.
Margaret Mary McCartney is a general practitioner, freelance writer and broadcaster based in Glasgow, Scotland. McCartney is a vocal advocate for evidence-based medicine. McCartney was a regular columnist at the British Medical Journal. She regularly writes articles for The Guardian and currently contributes to the BBC Radio 4 programme, Inside Health. She has written three popular science books, The Patient Paradox, The State of Medicine and Living with Dying. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McCartney contributed content to academic journals and broadcasting platforms, personal blog, and social media to inform the public and dispel myths about coronavirus disease.
There are bad things happening in medicine and academia but people talk about them, people criticize them, you know, and in the world of alternative therapies, you can be as far out as Matthias Rath and nobody will say a word.