Ben Goldacre's inaugural lecture: a whistlestop tour of everything we do!

Ben Goldacre's inaugural lecture: a whistlestop tour of the whole history of our group, from OpenPrescribing via TrialsTracker to OpenSAFELY and on through Open Science, policy work, and more. Because it’s an inaugural lecture you also get - at the beginning and the end - mawkish personal moments about history, family and friends.

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Lastly, you can read about OpenSAFELY.org: our landmark secure Trusted Research Environment that allows users to run analyses across the NHS GP records of the whole population while also retaining deep trust from privacy campaigners and professional groups. You can read more about how it works here, and the full technical user manual with everything you could ever want to know about the service here. You can see all the papers here, and the 155 projects from users at 22 different organisations including universities, NICE, UKHSA and more. If you’re a data scientist you can start using our tools online, in just a couple of hours, using randomly generated dummy data. All the code for the entire platform is shared freely under open licenses for security review, scientific review, and efficient re-use here, on GitHub. All the code (and we mean all) for every analysis can be found here. You can read more about how we use OpenSAFELY to make it easy and obligatory for users to follow best practice on open science here.

You can read about how NHS England and DHSC have made a major new investment in the NHS England OpenSAFELY Service to secure its future for users across the country, here.

And lastly, if you look closely in the opening minute, you’ll see a galaxy of stars in the audience. Tim Harford sitting next Simon Singh… Dorothy Bishop and Muir Gray… And most importantly our team, our friends, our funders, and our many collaborators.

Chapters
00:00 Walking to the stage
00:54 Start of the lecture
01:42 Bad Science
07:25 OpenPrescribing
28:03 Clinical Trials Transparency
40:40 Goldacre Review
50:35 OpenSAFELY
01:09:53 Thanks and closing remarks

[andrewkingdon]

A brilliant talk. A shame about the shouting which given I'm watching this at work listening on headphones was physically painful

[Lalallalu]

If I could show in a photo the jumps my dogs made at his shouting while I educate myself and they peacefully lie down with the BT device on... what the 💥H E C K💥💥 !!!! It's insane

[WilliamRussell]

Awesome talk. SO! I will share it with everyone.

[txdmsk]

Hi Ben!
I very much appreciate your work. I wish you had a bigger voice!
I love your books, and keep gifting / recommending them to people.
Still, no matter how good a pitch I cook up, most of them refuse to open them, because they think that not trusting pharma companies unconditionally is a cooky conspiracy theory.

[Allblack_]

Incredible use of health data! NOW to find someone in the Australian government to watch this and be inspired

[lucelxebinog]

He became like any other professor spitting out papers every few day’s done by others. But in stark contrast he js actually seriously changing things for the better.

[carterucm]

So, turns out im one of only five people in my entire NHS board area that uses a certain inhaler this year 😂

[flintoff]

Great talk, jeez the shouting is unnecessary and annoying.

[personalsigh]

This isn't true. You can't get someone's entire health record from HES