Congrats to Dr. Joe!

Each year since 2005, The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has awarded the Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, a prize that recognizes excellence in the promotion of science and reason, to individuals (sometimes more than one) who have taken on any number of controversial topics.

Previous topics have included the paranormal, irrational thinking, astrology, and both bad medicine and science.

This year, one of the winners was a chemist, and it should not be surprising to our readers that the choice was the incomparable Dr. Joe Schwarcz of McGill University in Montreal. (The 2013 award went to ACSH friend and former trustee, Dr. Paul Offit for his superlative book Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine).

"Dr. Joe," as his students call him, is wildly popular and has quite a following in print, as well as on radio and TV.

Some of the many reasons for his popularity are summarized by Dr. Josh Bloom, the Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science at ACSH, in his recent Science 2.0 article entitled Homeopsychopaths.

The title of the article that lauds Joe is entirely appropriate, since Schwarcz has been one of the leading chemists to debunk the nonsensical pseudoscience of homeopathy.

We at ACSH could not agree more with the CSI. "Dr. Joe" has dedicated his career to spreading sound science to a very large audience. He makes it fun to learn, while still challenging listeners to think critically.

Congrats, Dr. Joe! You earned it.