John Bohannon

John Bohannon is an American science journalist and scientist who is Director of Science at Primer, an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California. and his creation of the annual "Dance Your PhD" contest. His investigative journalism work includes: critiquing the Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties (2006) uncovering serious problems with the peer review process at a large number of journals that charge fees to authors (2013) showing how uncritical mass media can become victims of claims made in fake scientific papers (2015)

Bohannon is involved in the effective altruism movement. In July 2015 he became a member of Giving What We Can, an organization whose members pledge to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities. He is the older brother of Cat Bohannon.

Education Bohannon completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in molecular biology at the University of Oxford in 2002, supervised by Paul Rainey. His doctoral thesis investigated the role of an operon in the adaptive evolution of populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens.

Investigative science reporting Bohannon has frequently reported on the intersections of science and war. He received a Reuters environmental journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on the water crisis in Gaza. In that year he also critiqued the Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties.

Two of his later journalism projects are described below.

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?"

In September 2013, Bohannon submitted a fake and very flawed scientific article to a large number of fee-charging open-access publishers, This approach was criticized by some commentators, as well as by some publishers of fee charging journals, who complained that his sting targeted only one type of open-access journal and no subscription-based journals, thereby damaging the reputation of the open access movement.

Intentionally misleading chocolate study The chocolate study. Click for bigger version and original PDF file. In 2015, under the pseudonym Johannes Bohannon, John Bohannon wrote a paper"Chocolate with high Cocoa content as a weight-loss accelerator" detailing a deliberately bad study that he had designed and run to see how the media would pick up the "meaningless" that was picked up by the German tabloid Bild, the Daily Star, the Irish Examiner, Cosmopolitan 's German website, The Times of India, the German and Indian sites of the Huffington Post, television news in the US, and an Australian morning talk show." As the Gonzo Scientist, Bohannon took "a look at the intersections among science, culture, and artand, in true gonzo style, [didn't] shrink from making himself a part of the story. The stories include original art and accompanying multimedia features."

Dance Your PhD

Many Gonzo Scientist columns were devoted to advertising the Dance Your PhD competition, which Bohannon created in early 2008. The annual competition encourages scientists from all around the world to interpret their doctoral dissertations in dance form. Slate Magazine ran a profile on Bohannon and the competition in 2011. dance troupe at TEDxBrussels in November 2011, where he satirized Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal by modestly proposing that PowerPoint software be replaced by live dancers. Bohannon then went on to perform with Black Label Movement at TED2012 in March in Long Beach, California. And, in April 2012, Bohannon presented on the Dance Your PhD contest at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS).

In 2015, Bohannon appeared on the "Adam Ruins Nutrition" episode of the Adam Ruins Everything truTV series. In 2016, he joined Adam Ruins Everything host Adam Conover on episode 5 of Adam's Adam Ruins Everything podcast series, "Science Journalism with John Bohannon", where he spoke about the fake chocolate study described above and discussed how fraudulent studies are created and promoted through mass media.