The Seat of the Soul: The Origins of the Autism Epidemic

By: Andrew Wakefield, MP, BS, FRCS, FRCPath

(Presented at Carnegie Mellon University, November 17, 2005)

Where is the seat of the soul? Many men have spent many hours pondering the elusive seat of the soul, including Rene Descartes, who felt that it was in the pineal gland (in the center of the brain--it is responsible for much of our circadian rhythms, amongst other things). He may have been right, he may have been wrong. The seat of the soul may be as elusive as the origins of autism itself. As a gastroenterologist, I am inclined to believe that it's in the intestine, and I'll try to explain why.

A Brief History of Autism

Leo Kanner first described autism in eleven children in 19431. The presenting features in patients were so new and so consistent and also so different from everything that had been seen before that they merited publication as a new disease syndrome. There were no controls because it wasn't known what to control against. This is in the nature of the original description of human disease syndromes. The symptoms as described by Kanner still serve as the template for our understanding of autism. In spite of the fact that more than half of the children had clear symptoms of possible intestinal disease, he interpreted the symptoms as psychologically-based—a misconception that persists today.

In the 1950s Bruno Bettelheim was considered a leading expert on autism, despite the fact that he had no formal training of any kind (he held a PhD in philosophy). He propagated Kanner's theory that autism was a psychological disorder caused by emotionally cold parents (the "refrigerator mother" theory). As recently as 1981 he wrote, "All my life I've been working with children whose lives were destroyed because their mothers hated them."2 It is tragic that for decades this notion was universally accepted, and indeed it still lingers. A paper written in 2002 (I regret to say from my own medical school) states, "Many children with autism have unusual diets, often associated with constipation, which might lead to non-specific abnormalities of the bowel."3 The implication remains that it's the parent's fault, for feeding the children what they feed them. Kanner and Bettelheim's legacy of blaming the parent hasn't left us altogether.

In the presence of a disease as elusive and enigmatic as autism, it has often surprised me that so many people claim to be experts. We are inundated with "expert" opinion, even though so little is really known about the disease itself. The opinions are many:

• There is no epidemic, we're simply better at making the diagnosis. Now, those of you who live with autism every day know that it is clinically striking--it is not something that we could ever have missed in the past. The greatest clinicians in medicine were not even practicing in the 20th century, but the century before: people like Charcot from the Salpêtrière in Paris, and his colleague Pierre Marie; these were among the truly great clinicians. There was not much they could do about the diseases they encountered, but they described them in meticulous detail. Had autism existed before the time of Leo Kanner, I suspect we would have had vivid descriptions in the medical literature prior to him.* In his paper, Kanner himself wrote, "Since 1938, there have come to our attention a number of children whose condition differs so markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far, that each case merits—and, I hope, will eventually receive—a detailed consideration of its fascinating peculiarities." If the prevalence rates were constant, Mark Blaxill has calculated that from the known population of the world thus far we would have had some 300 million patients with autism before Leo Kanner. These facts lead me to believe that it is not an ancient disease.

• There is no bowel disease in children with ASD--bowel symptoms are simply to be expected in children with autism, and are therefore irrelevant. As a gastroenterologist, I fail to understand this at all.

• There is no link between the gut and the brain. I tell my colleagues who say this that we should go out for a beer. They think I'm offering to buy them a drink, but they're missing the point. If they drink a pint of beer, within five minutes or less they will feel the impact in their brains. Toxins from the gut reach the brain very, very quickly.

• The temporal link to vaccination is purely coincidental. Now this may be true—it may absolutely be true, but it is not a conclusion that we can reach a priori. A connection must be excluded by due diligence and investigation, and if that is the conclusion we come to, we can exonerate the vaccines.

• And perhaps most insulting to common sense, there are "experts" telling us that Thimerosal—nearly 50% ethyl mercury-- one of the most toxic substances known to man, is actually safe in vaccines—a harmless and appropriate addition to the bloodstream of an infant.

Our belief systems in medicine and in science exist to be demolished, mine no less than anyone else's. Erich Honecker, the late leader of the German Democratic Republic, comes to mind. He said in 1989, "The Wall will be standing in fifty and even in one hundred years," and of course the wall that divided Berlin is gone today. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow.

To read this article in its entirety, continue here.

Worth noting:

Two independent studies have backed up Dr. Wakefield's 1998 study linking the MMR vaccine to autism and bowel disease. In 2001, John O'Leary, Professor of Pathology at St. James's Hospital and Trinity College, Dublin, replicated Dr. Wakefield's finding. A team from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, headed by Dr. Stephen Walker, examined 275 children with regressive autism and bowel disease and of the 82 tested so far, 70 proved positive for the measles virus. All results were vaccine strain and none were wild measles, which proves that in the gastrointestinal tract of a number of children who have been diagnosed with regressive autism, there is evidence of measles virus. But the vaccination proponents will no doubt dismiss these collaborating findings as a myth as well".