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Helen Pearson - Five Way Interview

Helen Pearson is an award-winning journalist and editor for Nature in London. Named European Science Journalist of the Year 2025, she is an honorary professor at University College London, where she teaches science writing. Her first book, The Life Project, was named best science book of the year by The Observer and was a book of the year for The Economist. Her new book is Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works.

Why science?

At school, I could’ve specialised in art and writing, or science and maths. I enjoyed both. I chose science — I think because it helps make sense of people and the wider world. I became fascinated by DNA and human biology, and that’s never gone away. 

However, the hankering to write never went away either, and now as a science journalist I get to combine both: the endless fascination of science and the craft of writing. At Nature, I often think of questions I’d like to know answers to and then I get to call up the world’s experts to find those answers. That means I’m always learning and speaking to interesting people, and I love that. 

Why this book?

A few years ago, I met and interviewed Iain Chalmers, a remarkable British doctor and researcher, and was inspired by his story.  

In the 1960s, Chalmers and some other pioneering doctors realised that much of what they’d been taught in medical school was wrong. Most decisions about treatment were based on someone’s opinion (‘do this because I think it’s right’) or conventional wisdom (‘that’s how it’s always been done'). What generally happened was that everyone followed the advice of the most senior doctor in the room — now known as ‘eminence-based medicine’. 

These pioneers argued that medical practices should instead be based on evidence from research, such as randomised trials showing whether a drug works. This approach quickly caught on, and evidence-based medicine has become the main way in which Western medicine is practised.  

Almost everyone has benefited from evidence-based medicine, but few people outside medicine know it’s fascinating backstory or that it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. That’s a big reason I wanted to write the book — as well as to show how many other disciplines have come to embrace evidence as part of an ‘evidence revolution’. The book looks at how evidence is being adopted in government policy, policing, conservation, management, education, international development and even parenting — as well as the huge barriers it faces.  I ended up interviewing over 200 researchers across more than five years.

There is a considerable dispute in physics and cosmology about whether purely mathematical theories with no observational or experimental evidence to back them up are really science. Would you say that evidence is an essential for anything to be scientific?

I think there is value in generating hypotheses and theories that do not yet have support from empirical evidence, but for which there might be evidence in the future. 

One thing that was clear from researching my book is that the word ‘evidence’ is somewhat confusing and used in different ways. The word overall means information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid. I focused in the book on empirical evidence, from careful observation and experimentation. There are other types of evidence, such as evidence in a court of law and evidence from someone’s lived experience. There is a risk, however, that people attach the term ‘evidence-based’ to things to give them an undeserved gloss of legitimacy. 

What’s next?

My book sparked a deep interest in methods, such as systematic reviews, for synthesising and making sense of bodies of evidence. I’m hoping to learn more about this when I take up a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in Cambridge this August. Many science journalists write breathlessly about the latest discovery, but rigorous science and science journalism require us to take stock of the evidence as a whole. I also want to nurture the seed of an idea I have for a next book.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m usually excited by whatever story I’m currently reporting, and right now it’s one for Nature about whether there is a crisis of public trust in science. The answer is, of course, nuanced. But most surveys show that overall, trust in scientists is high relative to that of other professions (and much higher than trust in journalists, CEOs or politicians).

Photo © Alastair Fyfe

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