Little Atoms with Ben Goldacre

On this week's show, Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy are joined in the studio by Dr Ben Goldacre, making his second appearance on the show.

Ben Goldacre is a writer, broadcaster and medical doctor from the UK who is best known for his Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack health products, pseudoscientific cosmetics adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations, as well as wider themes such as the medicalisation of everyday life and the psychology of irrational beliefs.

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 MRI brain scans of language and executive function, and was also funded by the British Academy to do a Masters degree in Philosophy at King's. Ben now works full time for the NHS, appears regularly on radio and TV, and has written for publications as diverse as Time Out, the British Medical Journal, New Statesman and The Lancet, as well as writing and presenting 'The Rise of The Lifestyle Nutritionists' and 'The Power of Placebo' in 2008 on BBC Radio 4.

Ben's first book, Bad Science, was published in September by Forth Estate.