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. He is known for his career prior to Primer as a science journalist and Harvard University biologist, most notably with his "Gonzo Scientist" online series at Science Magazine and his creation of the annual "Dance Your PhD" contest. His investigative journalism work includes:

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.

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 and was supervised by Paul Rainey.

Bohannon is Director of Science at Primer, a San Francisco, California, company that develops and sells artificial intelligence technology, started by his friend Sean Gourley. Before joining Primer, Bohannon was a contributing correspondent for Science Magazine and also wrote for Discover Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

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. After embedding in southern Afghanistan in 2010, he was the first journalist to convince the US military to voluntarily release civilian casualty data.

Two of his later journalism projects are described below.

In September 2013, Bohannon submitted a fake and very flawed scientific article to a large number of fee-charging open-access publishers, revealing that fewer than 40% were living up to their promise of rigorously peer-reviewing what is published. The spoof paper was accepted by 157 of the 255 open-access journals (61.6%) that said they would review it. 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.

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" findings. He worked with film-maker Peter Onneken, who was making a film about junk science in the diet industry and how fad diets became headline news despite having deeply flawed study designs and very little supporting evidence.