Wakefield Essay One

[On Friday, January 28, 2010, the General Medical Counsel handed down its findings of fact in Dr. Wakefield's case. Please refer to this essay for my presentation and comments.]

[Note: This and the following ten essays give the complete text and footnotes of a nearly 15,000 word essay I wrote on the case of Dr. Wakefield, an essay which was published in the March 2009 edition of The Autism File. The footnotes appear in the text with the small gold book mark, and then appear at the bottom of the respective essays. Not all footnotes could be put in this format, and the diligent reader will have to consult the Autism File essay for more complete citations. At the end of these essays is one culminatory essay, which gives the text of remarks I made in a joint presentation with Dr. Wakefield at the Autism One conference in Chicago, IL on May 21, 2009.]

Personal Introduction

My first introduction to the autism movement was through a memorable July 2006 meeting with Dr. Bernard Rimland, founder of the Autism Research Institute and the Autism Society of America. At that time, Dr. Rimland was in the last stages of his struggle against cancer, but he graciously agreed to meet me in the ARI office in San Diego. Instead of focusing on his accomplishments over nearly 50 years in autism research and advocacy, he wanted to talk about me and my interests. Disarmed by his candor and inquisitiveness, I found myself all the more wanting to listen to him and his advice. At the close of our meeting he said one thing that has never left me, "Bill," he intoned, "never be afraid to search for the truth about autism and to tell it when you have found it."

I filed away that piece of advice, not knowing if and how it would ever come in handy. Then, in October 2008, at an autism conference in San Diego, I met a man, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who has been both vilified and honored by people inside and outside the autism movement because of an article published 11 years ago which raised questions about possible links between the MMR vaccine, inflammatory bowel disease and autism. But, even more to the point, in the 11 years since the publication of that article he has faced a combination of personal and professional attacks that seem designed not simply to criticize his science but to destroy his reputation.

Over the last two years, I have read several of these critical accounts. Many of them raise issues of significant importance, but the one thing missing in all these accounts was evidence that anyone writing had actually talked to Dr. Wakefield to try to determine if the story told about him had any truth to it. Or, to put it in literary critical terms, I wondered if there was an alternative narrative of equally or even more compelling truth to it than was being told. So, when I met him in San Diego, I decided first of all to strike up a conversation with him. As with many encounters in life, conversations consist of some pleasantries and a lot of "taking the measure" of the other person. After a thirty-minute conversation, I decided I would ask if I could come down to Austin TX, where he is Director of Thoughtful House, an autism treatment and research facility, to interview him on the "non-scientific" charges leveled against him (conflicts of interest, mistreating of research subjects, trying to leverage patents for personal gain, etc.). After considering the matter for a bit, he agreed. So, in a gambit as simple and as complex as that, I went down to Austin TX in mid-January 2009 and conducted more than 12 hours of interviews with him over three days.

In preparation for the interviews, I wrote a long memo, going through the chronology of events before the publication of the crucial 1998 article, listing dozens of questions which he needed to answer. In fact, as I was devising this "rough draft" memo for myself, I was thinking that he surely had a lot of questions to answer; indeed, I was a bit skeptical of his ability to pull it off well. Thus, when he and I greeted each other at 9:00 a.m. on January 15 at his office in Thoughtful House, I was genuinely open to him but felt, indeed, that the onus was on him to explain himself. This paper describes what I found upon seeking the truth about Dr. Wakefield, especially as it relates to the course of events preceding the publication of the 1998 paper. In doing this, I celebrate the memory of Dr. Bernard Rimland, who emphatically told me in July 2006 to seek and then tell the truth as I entered the autism arena. I have tried here to be faithful to that charge.

A play on the title of John Keats' 1818 sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." In that poem Keats expressed his wonder at the clarity and potency of the Iliad upon reading George Chapman's new translation of it.

Writer/consultant living in Oregon. Former law professor, litigation attorney, pastor, professor of history and government, editorial writer, professor of religion and humanities, author/editor of 10 books and the equivalent of 60 more 200-page books on web page: www.drbillong.com.

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