Credit: Simon Singh
Simon Singh has written four best-selling science books and made several award-winning documentaries. But for the past two years he has perhaps been best known as the scientist who was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) - and won.
After initially wanting to become a nuclear physicist, Singh found that his passion lay in sharing the wonder of science with the public and went on to work for the BBC, where he produced and directed scientific documentaries, including one on the world's most notorious mathematical problem, Fermat's Last Theorem, which earned him a BAFTA award.
He then went on to write a book of the same name, which became a number one bestseller in the UK. His latest book, Trick or treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, examines the science behind alternative medicine claims, including a section on chiropractics - which earned him the libel lawsuit.
He is now working with many other writers and scientists to change the UK's "disgraceful" libel laws. The victorious Brit returned to Australia in November 2010 to speak at The Amazing Meeting of the Australia Skeptics.
Before he returned to the English winter, he caught up with Fiona MacDonald for lunch and talked about how Australia helped him win the court case, what he plans to write about next and why he would do it all over again.
FM: Congratulations on your win, how did you feel when you found out the BCA were dropping the case?
SS: Thank you. Not only did the case come to an end, but for a long time it looked catastrophically bad, so it was doubly great to be able to turn it around and come back victorious. And also at the same time there was this mountain of pressure for libel reform, which is great.
FM: You had a lot of supporters behind you, including Cosmos. Did having those people behind you help your campaign?
SS: Definitely. One of the reasons I really wanted to come over to Australia is that everyone has been so supportive. I mean Cosmos has published articles about the case, bloggers blogged about it, the Young Australian Skeptics podcasted about it, and that support was personally really important to me.
I wanted to come back here and thank everybody and tell them the story they've been part of. These stories don't always have happy endings and so it's nice to come back and share with everybody.
FM: What's the next step in the libel reform campaign?
SS: Almost a year ago we published a report called "Free Speech is Not For Sale" - it was really kind of libel for beginners because people didn't care about what libel was.
Within two months we had a Ministry of Justice working group looking at the problem, political parties published their manifesto in April 2010 and everybody started getting into it. Now the government is doing its own libel reform bill [which was released on 15 March 2011].
No one wants to get rid of libel, we just want to rebalance it so that scientists and academic journals can put forward ideas, and so that other people can raise debate about these ideas and put forward their own ideas.
