Brown hosts many talks throughout the year. The lecture board brings in well-known speakers, departments hold colloquia and numerous groups and organizations get interesting people to talk about various subjects. This makes the University a livelier place — one with an exchange of ideas and discussion.
While Brown should welcome a broad range of viewpoints, we should not allow ourselves to be used as a soapbox for whomever would like to come speak. There is a point at which the damage done by hosting a speaker outweighs the benefits.
Last Friday, the Brown Bookstore hosted Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, the authors of "The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic," for "a reading and [discussion] of their research." Research is a highly generous word to use to describe what the authors have done. Essentially, they repackaged the last decade's worth of claims that mercury causes autism, disregarding the actual research that shows those claims to be utterly false. Study after study has shown that autism is not caused by mercury in vaccines.
To state it briefly, the authors of "The Age of Autism" make demonstrably false claims that lead to parents refusing to vaccinate their children. Falling vaccination rates lead in turn to the reemergence of diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough. The bookstore should not have hosted the Olmsted and Blaxill.
What do we as a university have to gain by hosting people promoting obviously false ideas? The anti-vaccination crowd will continue to give talks around the country and appear in credulous media outfits. The greatest benefit is that it could have allowed doctors and scientists to see the vogue anti-vaccination claims. It is very useful for interested doctors and scientists to know what is being said.
Otherwise, they could not check the claims against actual research and try to correct false statements. However, the bookstore had this as a normal book reading targeted at the public.
The detrimental effects of this event overshadow the positive ones. When Brown hosts a speaker, it provides a certain level of endorsement. Essentially, the University is saying, "this person is worth listening to." We do not just pick speakers up off the street. No one would go up to one of Lyndon LaRouche's acolytes on Thayer Street and ask him or her to come give a talk about how the British Empire is currently the biggest world threat and how that relates to Obama being a Nazi. We expect people to be coherent, thoughtful and not live in a fantasy world.
By giving the authors a prestigious soapbox, the bookstore is lending them credibility that they otherwise would not have. People are liable to give the medical claims in "The Age of Autism" more sway than they otherwise would because they expect Brown to not host people giving bad medical advice.
These haven't been the only unsavory characters that have appeared at Brown. Pervez Musharraf and Rick Santorum, among many others, have given talks here. The same thing happens at Brown's peer institutions. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited New York City to speak at the United Nations last week. During his 2007 UN visit he controversially appeared at a Columbia event.
These talks should undergo the same ethical calculus as the "Age of Autism" reading. Is it a net benefit or detriment to bring in these speakers?
On the whole, it is beneficial to have them speak. Unlike the authors of "The Age of Autism," these speakers are not giving bad medical advice. Santorum would not have had much of an effect by using unsound science to try to justify why embryos should be considered humans or why queer people effectively should not be. Ahmadinejad would not have had much success from a Columbia stage convincing people that the Holocaust did not happen. But the anti-vaccination crowd does rely on these sorts of talks to spread their personal dislike for vaccines and whatever rationalization they currently use to justify it; in Olmsted and Blaxill's case, it is mercury and autism.
They do have plenty of media at their disposal. Oprah, Larry King and the Huffington Post are all too happy to promote these beliefs. Luckily, those people and organizations do not have any academic heft. People may trust them, but they are not doctors.
We need to be mindful of the consequences of choosing speakers. Just as the biology department would need to think carefully about the consequences if they wanted to have some fun by bringing in a creationist or the same with the physics department having a colloquium speaker advocate for geocentrism, all organizations at Brown should be conscious of whether a speaker will make Brown a better or worse place.
David Sheffield '11 is a math-physics concentrator, who actually does enjoy listening to pseudoscientists. He can be contacted at david_sheffield@brown.edu.
is a member of the 
60 comments
Toxic Chemicals Safety Act of 2010 (TCSA). The primary purpose of this Bill is to regulate that which we expose our children to on a daily dose of anything that touches the skin, hair etc. Many of the comments in the article and commentators touch upon toxins in vaccines and we must also know that the FDA does not regulate the Personal Care industry of products that go on your skin. There are so many eggregious areas associated with what toxin are in the products and testing has concluded in many lab animals that they cause neurological and cancerous outcomes, not to mention reproductive and GENE mutuations. It's mind blowing to know that we here in the U.S. have only banned 9 ingredients vs. Europe which is over 1,300. Additionally the mercury in vaccines is banned in many countries but here in the U.S. it is seen as safe as I hear mom's on the school yard tell me they disagree with me because their doctor "god" told them so. Really, at least you can request for a vaccine to be free of mercury, but we cannot ask that our babies sunscreen, baby wash, our soaps, Axe products for teenagers all be free of known carcinogens. My son along with many other boys I know have ADD and increased hyperactivity due to dyes, toxins etc., so I really am NOT shocked by how their little bodies work - but, I am shocked that most parents don't care because they are only thinking about today and not what the reproductive and gene mutuations of tommorrow's babies will bring. Suzanne Arena, Ava Anderson Nontoxic
“Smith realised that a single, striking photograph was required to become a symbol of Minamata disease. In Smith's own words, ‘It grew and grew in my mind that to me the symbol of Minamata was, finally, a picture of this woman [the mother], and the child, Tomoko. One day I simply said […] let us try to make that symbolic picture’.And read Age of Autism by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill.
I see that you and/or any of the 'anti-vaccine' name callers have responded to any of the questions/comments I posted yesterday...hmmmm...interesting....
...I mean, I know my comment was pretty long, but given that Matt C and David completely ignored the questions and comments I made...well, it says a LOT!Gosh, you would think there would AT LEAST be defense to their own statements, and even the name "anti-vaccine"....We see right thru you guys....just keep on going round and round with your scare tactics and wordplay...with no real scientific explanation or REAL documentation/proof of anything you state, opinions are opinions for sure, and everyone is entitled to their own,BUT if you present a statement as a FACT within your own opinion, without any backup, well, its nothing more than an opinion...certainly NOT FACT.......see my last post yesterday for the specifics...
w w w . ageofautism.com/2010/08/autism-and-heavy-metals-an-interview-with-mary-catherine-desoto-phd.htmlArticle from Acta Neurobiol Exp 2010, 70: 165–176:
Sorting out the spinning of autism: heavy metals and the question of incidence
Mary Catherine DeSoto and Robert T. Hitlan
w w w . ane.pl/pdf/7021.pdf
“In this paper, we argue that increasingly over the past decade, positions that deny a link to environmental toxins and autism are based on relatively weak science and are disregarding the bulk of scientific literature. In this paper, we are not focusing on vaccines, which is but one exposure pathway, but on exposure to toxic heavy metals as a broader class, of which a vaccine containing a heavy metal preservative would be but one possibility of exposure. It should be clear that any link between toxins and autism is almost certainly mediated by one’s genetic makeup, and that other toxins, such as organophosphates (Eskenazi et al. 2007) likely play a role as well. In this conceptualization, the gene pool did not change, but exposure to substances that directly affect gene functioning is changing…“The question about toxic exposure and autism is open, with the weight of evidence favoring a connection that is not well understood. Although it is not possible to say with certainty, it seems likely that the connection would be mediated by genetic susceptibility and ability to detoxify. That is, some people have genotypes that confer higher susceptibility to toxic exposures…”
Then, we have Donald T + GOLD SALTS = Substantial reduction in autistic behaviorsKnowing that gold binds to mercury (just ask the chem folks), it seems very logical to deduce that the ethyl mercury may have in fact had some role in the manifestation of this patient's autism.Some may call that a leap or pseudo-science; I call it a LOGICAL CONNECTION. When you combine that story with all the evidence that Age of Autism turns up showing a commonality of early exposures to ethyl mercury in Leo Kanners original case reports, it’s a compelling body of data that deserves discussion and debate versus censorship and book banning.And that doesn’t even take into account the ethics involved – if there is a potential way to help autistic people have better lives and reduce the personal and familial toll of extreme social isolation and the societal toll of paying for the care of the large and growing popution of autistic people, then by all means, let the GOLD SALTS CLINICAL TRIALS begin!
“There is no convincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines…” (do a web search for “CDC vaccines safety concerns thimerosal). In fact, the Thimerosal doses are NOT low. The concentration of mercury in a flu vaccine with Thimerosal preservative (50 parts per million mercury) is 250 times the United States Environmental Protection Agency Hazardous Waste threshold (0.20 parts per million mercury). So any spilled or unused flu vaccines with Thimerosal cannot legally be flushed down a sanitary sewer.
It is time for this pathetic double think to end. It is time to remove Thimerosal from vaccines. It is time to recall vaccines with Thimerosal. It is time to end the Age of Autism.
This leads the readers to misunderstand a fundamental element of the scientific method. While a specific study may not find a causal relation, it is not possible to have a study that has shown that autism is NOT caused by mercury in vaccines. Check and read one of the many unbanned books on the scientific method at the Brown University Library.And then read the literature that supports a casual relation.