An interview with Rosi Sexton: polymath

Jump to follow-up On Sunday 23 September, we recorded an interview with Rosi Sexton. Ever since I got to know her, I’ve been impressed by her polymathy. She’s a musician, a mathematician and a champion athlete, and now an osteopath: certainly an unusual combination. You can read about her on her Wikipedia [...]

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

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Bernard L. Ginsborg (1925 – 2018). A tribute.

Jump to follow-up If you are not a pharmacologist or physiologist, you may never have heard of Bernard Ginsborg. I first met him in 1960. He was a huge influence on me and a great friend. I’m publishing this here because the Physiological Society has published only a brief obituary. Bernard with his wife, Andy (Andrina). You [...]

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

Read the rest at: Bernard L. Ginsborg (1925 – 2018). A tribute.

Eugenics, UCL and freedom of speech

Jump to follow-up On Monday evening (8th January 2018), I got an email from Ben van der Merwe, a UCL student who works as a reporter for the student newspaper, London Student.  He said “Our investigation has found a ring of academic psychologists associated with Richard Lynn’s journal Mankind Quarterly to [...]

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

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Christopher Robin: a sad story

Jump to follow-up Today we went to see the film, Goodbye Christopher Robin.  It was very good. I, like most children, read Pooh books as a child.  Image from Wikipedia I got interested in their Author, A.A. Milne, when I discovered that he’d done a mathematics degree at Cambridge. So had [...]

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

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If your baby is crying. what do you do? Stick pins in it

This piece is almost identical with today’s Spectator Health article. 

This week there has been enormously wide coverage in the press for one of the worst papers on acupuncture that I’ve come across. As so often, the paper showed the opposite of what its title and press release, claimed. For another stunning example of this sleight [...]

Read the rest at: If your baby is crying. what do you do? Stick pins in it

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

More on bullying at Imperial College London. What’s being done?

The last email of Stephan Grimm has had more views than any other on this blog. “Publish and perish at Imperial College London: the death of Stefan Grimm“. Since then it’s been viewed more than 210,000 times. The day after it was posted, the server failed under the load.

Since than, I posted two follow-up pieces. On December [...]

Read the rest at: More on bullying at Imperial College London. What’s being done?

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

Hotshot. A supplement scam with a difference?

Jump to follow-up The "supplement" industry is a scam that dwarfs all other forms of alternative medicine. Sales are worth over $100 billion a year, a staggering sum. But the claims they make are largely untrue: plain fraudulent. Although the industry’s advertisements like to claim "naturalness". in fact most of the synthetic vitamins are manufactured by [...]

Read the rest at: Hotshot. A supplement scam with a difference?
DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

Food the Forgotten Medicine: More bait and switch from the “College of Medicine”

‘We know little about the effect of diet on health. That’s why so much is written about it’. That is the title of a post in which I advocate the view put by John Ioannidis that remarkably little is known about the health effects if individual nutrients. That ignorance has given rise to a vast industry selling advice that has little evidence to support it [...]

Read the rest at: Food the Forgotten Medicine: More bait and switch from the “College of Medicine” DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

Cupping: bruises for the gullible, and other myths in sport

This is my version of a post which I was asked to write for Indy Voices. It’s been published, though so many changes were made by the editor that I’m posting the original here.

So much has been said about cupping during the last week that it’s hard to say much that’s original. Yesterday I did [...]


Read the rest at: DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

NICE rejects acupuncture for low back pain

Of all types of alternative medicine, acupuncture is the one that has received the most approval from regular medicine. The benefit of that is that it’s been tested more thoroughly than most others. The result is now clear. It doesn’t work. See the evidence in Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo.

This blog has documented many cases [...]

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science
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Statistics and the law: the prosecutor’s fallacy

This post arose from a recent meeting at the Royal Society. It was organised by Julie Maxton to discuss the application of statistical methods to legal problems. I found myself sitting next to an Appeal Court Judge who wanted more explanation of the ideas. Here it is.

Some preliminaries 

The paper that I wrote recently was a [...]


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DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

Placebo effects are weak: regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

“Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the placebo effect are actually instances of statistical regression.” “Thus, we urge caution in interpreting patient improvements as causal effects of our actions and should avoid the conceit of assuming that [...]


Read the rest at: Placebo effects are weak: regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work

The perils of P values, in Chalkdust magazine

Chalkdust is a magazine published by students of maths from UCL Mathematics department. Judging by its first issue, it’s an excellent vehicle for popularisation of maths. I have a piece in the second issue

You can view the whole second issue on line, or download a pdf of the whole issue. Or a pdf of my [...]


Read the rest at: The perils of P values, in Chalkdust magazine
DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science 

Stefan Grimmm (1963 – 2014). A memorial to a victim of managerialism

Today, 25 September, is the first anniversary of the needless death of Stefan Grimm. This post is intended as a memorial.

He should be remembered, in the hope that some good can come from his death.

On 1 December 2014, I published the last email from Stefan Grimm, under the title “Publish and perish at Imperial [...]

DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science
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There are powerful currents whipping up the metric tide. The HEFCE metrics report

This is very quick synopsis of the 500 pages of a report on the use of metrics in the assessment of research. It’s by far the most thorough bit of work I’ve seen on the topic. It was written by a group, chaired by James Wilsdon, to investigate the possible role of metrics in the assessment of research [...]

Read the rest at: There are powerful currents whipping up the metric tide. The HEFCE metrics report - DC's Improbable Science: Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science

Are women still at a disadvantage in science?

There can be no doubt that the situation for women has improved hugely since I started at UCL, 50 years ago. At that time women were not allowed in the senior common room. It’s improved even more since the 1930s (read about the attitude of the great statistician, Ronald Fisher, to Florence Nightinglale David).

Recently Williams & Ceci published data that suggest that young women no longer face barriers in job selection in the USA (though it will take 20 years before that feeds through to professor level). But no sooner than one was feeling optimistic, along comes Tim Hunt who caused a media storm by advocating male-only labs [...]



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Prince Charles’ letters confirm that he’s not fit to be king

Picture: Getty

This post was written for the Spectator Health section, at short notice after the release of the spider letters. The following version is almost the same as appeared there, with a few updates. Some of the later sections are self-plagiarised from earlier posts.

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The age of enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the natural world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Eventually real universities were created and real democracy developed. The modern world was born.

People like Francis Bacon, Voltaire and Isaac Newton changed the world for the better. Well, that’s what most people think. But not Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall.

In 2010 he said...

Read more at Prince Charles’ letters confirm that he’s not fit to be king by David Colquhoun

The reproducibility of Science. A meeting report.

There is a widespread belief that science is going through a crisis of reproducibility. A meeting was held to discuss the problem. It was organised by Academy of Medical Sciences, the Wellcome Trust, MRC and BBSRC, and It was chaired by Dorothy Bishop (of whose blog I’m a huge fan). It’s good to see that scientific establishment is beginning to take notice. Up to now it’s been bloggers who’ve been making the running. I hadn’t intended to write a whole post about it, but some sufficiently interesting points arose that I’ll have a go.

The first point to make is that, as far as I know, the “crisis” is limited to, or at least concentrated in, quite restricted areas of science. In particular, it doesn’t apply to the harder end of sciences. Nobody in physics, maths or chemistry talks about a crisis of reproducibility. I’ve heard very little about irreproducibility in electrophysiology (unless you include EEG work)...

Read on: The reproducibility of Science. A meeting report.

The death of Stefan Grimm was “needless”. And Imperial has done nothing to prevent it happening again

The last email of Stefan Grimm, and its follow-up post, has been read over 195,000 times now.


After Grimm’s death, Imperial announced that it would investigate itself The report is now available.

Performance Management: Review of policies, procedures and support available to staff Following the tragic death of a member of the College’s staff community, Professor Stefan Grimm, the Provost invited the Senior Consul, Professor Richard Thompson, and the Director of Human Resources, Mrs Louise Lindsay, to consider the relevant College policies, procedures and the support available to all staff during performance review.

The report is even worse than I expected. It can be paraphrased as saying ‘our bullying was not done sufficiently formally -we need more forms and box-ticking’.


At the heart of the problem is Imperial’s Personal Review and Development Plan (PRDP). Here is an extract...

Read more at: DC's Improbable Science by David Colquhoun

The University of Warwick brings itself into disrepute -four times. Watch your tone of voice.

The University of Warwick seems determined to wrest the title of worst employer from Imperial College London and Queen Mary College London. In little over a year, Warwick has had four lots of disastrous publicity, all self-inflicted.

 First came the affair of Thomas Docherty...

Read more at: The University of Warwick brings itself into disrepute -four times. Watch your tone of voice by David Colquhoun