Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre is a British physician, academic, and science writer who holds the Bennett Professorship of Evidence-Based Medicine and directs the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He studied physiological sciences at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a first-class BA in 1995, and subsequently trained in medicine at University College London. He is a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to medicine and science communication, and he founded the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials initiative to require registration and open reporting of all clinical trial results.

Goldacre is best known for his Bad Science column in The Guardian, which ran for over a decade, and for his book Bad Science (2008), which reached number one in the UK non-fiction charts and has sold over half a million copies worldwide. The book systematically dismantles the evidence failures behind homeopathy, nutritional supplement marketing, questionable pharmaceutical claims, and the science journalism that uncritically amplifies them. His follow-up Bad Pharma (2012) turned his attention to how pharmaceutical companies selectively publish trial data in ways that mislead clinicians and regulators, contributing to preventable harm.

What distinguishes Goldacre is his focus not just on specific fraudulent claims but on the systemic and structural conditions that allow bad science to persist and propagate — including broken peer review, publication bias, statistical misuse, and the media's appetite for oversimplified health stories. His work has influenced medical policy and trial transparency requirements in the UK and internationally. His DataLab research group at Oxford continues to work on evidence standards in medicine and public health policy.