Aric Sigman

Early life

Sigman was born in the United States into a Jewish family. His father and grandfather were both professors of medicine. He has lived in Britain since 1973.

He has made many appearances on day-time TV. For instance, he appeared in 1994 in the role of an Agony Uncle giving advice to children on the Saturday Morning children's programme Live & Kicking. He is quite involved in the field of health education writing in numerous tabloids such as Britain's, Daily Mail. He lectures in schools on the subject of PSHE (Personal, social health and economic) education.

He has published medical journal articles and has authored pop science books too. These have centred on subjects popular with the tabloid media such as alcoholism, eating disorders, parental corporal punishment (of which he is an ardent advocate), school corporal punishment, and the influence on children of hours spent in front of an electronic screen such as a TV or computer.

Musical career

In 1982, Sigman released a 45 single on Savman Productions, a company owned by his brother Nick Sigman.

He had an with A-side track "Come On" and the B-side track "I am a Nerd," both performed in a new wave, synth style, with lyrics about a science-oriented, math scholar who has a penchant for computers.,

Controversy

Sigman has been labeled as a "pseudoscientist" and accused of "cherry picking scientific literature". His essays have been described as fanciful, and deliberately incomplete. His articles, such as Facebook Causes Cancer, have been sharply criticized for their omissions by scientists such as Dr Ben Goldacre. In an article in the Guardian in 2011, his paper in the Biologist was described as "misrepresenting individual studies" by Professor Dorothy Bishop. In response to these claims Sigman said that "It was clear that my article on daycare wasn't a scientific paper."