I finished Bad Science by Ben Goldacre yesterday, and I have to say that it’s probably the best book I’ve read so far this year. It’s simply brilliant.
Goldacre is a practising doctor in the NHS, but is also a columnist for the Guardian newspaper and his own website, badscience.net, which he uses to pick apart other newspaper articles on the subject of science.
Rather than a collection of past columns, which I was half-expecting, this is an entirely new book and written as one, in that it references backwards and forwards in the text to things that are covered elsewhere.
The subject material is media coverage of science in general, and in particular its coverage of pseudomedical treatments/cures. Goldacre criticises the media for simply not understanding the science behind most of their stories, and for not bothering to read the actual peer-reviewed trial results in academic publications.
Indeed, that is if there are any published results. So many articles seem to be based on press releases from “scientists” who claim to have produced stunning datasets which completely contradict existing scientific theories, but then fail to show how these results came about, even years later.
Goldacre does become a bit one-track in this, repeating the questions over and over again: “where is this data published? Is it in a scientific journal where it can be examined and criticised?” But you can forgive him this, because it is these simple questions that most journalists fail to ask, every time.
Goldacre is an angry writer on this subject. When I read Gomorrah last month, it was by an equally angry author, but I felt that his anger tainted the writing somewhat. The narrative was a bit disjointed, and he just wanted to name and shame people.
In Bad Science, Goldacre is equally eager to name and shame those who commit these crimes against journalism, but it’s in a more measured approach as he deconstructs exactly why they failed to write clearly or accurately. He also tears apart the celebrity “scientists” such as nutritionist Gillian McKeith, showing how their attempts to claim that their actions/theories are scientific are in fact complete tripe.
Whilst Goldacre’s anger comes through in the text, so does his willingness to inform the public of the methods they should be using to examine science in the media. He writes that the sole intention of his book is to give the reader the skills to call bullshit when reading a newspaper, and to give clear reasons why the story in question is at best inaccurate and at worst a total crock of shit.
He does so brilliantly. I feel so much cleverer after reading this book, even if I did consider myself to be an ultra-cynical consumer of the media beforehand. It’s simply incredible how often the media get it wrong when it comes to science stories, or chooses to extrapolate from a single data point to something which is neither claimed nor proved by the data as a whole.
Goldacre reserves his strongest ire for generalist journalists who consider themselves to be cleverer than the scientists, and so re-interpret any data with which they are presented. Admittedly, his caricaturing of them all as humanities graduates is a little heavy-handed and unnecessary, but you can see why he does it.
I can’t recommend this book enough for anyone that has even a passing interest in the media, science, medicine, “miracle cures” and how they interact. This should be prescribed reading for classrooms.
