Goodbye Francis Collins: NIH Director Hails Deliberate Waste of Time, Cash and Lives
Good morning: Typepad ate this morning’s post. Sorry for the late start. John Stone wrote this about Francis Collins in February 2020. Collins leaves autism in a much worse condition than when he found it. The mark of a very bad leader unless he just followed orders. We will be posting our posts about him over the weekend to help readers fully understand the depth of his impotence.
By John Stone
In a short article in the Southern Maryland Chronicle, the head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, praised the latest autism genetic study entitled “Largest-Ever Genetic Study of Autism Yields New Insights”. Perhaps the message here is that, in order to fight crime, the government decided to investigate the victims rather than the perpetrators (for three decades, in fact). In 2006, as the leader of the Human Genome Project, Collins told Congress:
“But genes alone don’t tell the whole story. The recent rise in chronic diseases like diabetes, childhood asthma, obesity, or autism cannot be due to major changes in the human gene pool because these changes take much longer. They must be conditional.” Changes in the environment, including diet and physical activity, that can lead to disease in genetically predisposed individuals. Therefore, GEI (the Genes and Environment Initiative) will also invest in innovative new technologies / sensors to measure environmental toxins, food intake and physical activity, and the use of new tools of genomics, proteomics and understanding of metabolic rates to measure an individual’s biological response to determine these influences. “
The online references to GEI seem to run dry around 2008 (maybe they were in danger of finding something). So Collins warned 14 years ago that this type of research would not produce material results, and this is what the government has been doing more or less as an employment program ever since (typically the new study involves nearly two hundred authors). . As Eisenhower said in vain in his farewell speech six decades ago:
“Today, the lonely inventor who tinkers in his shop is overshadowed by working groups of scientists in laboratories and test fields. Likewise, the free university, historically the source of free ideas and scientific discovery, has seen a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the enormous cost involved, a government mandate is practically a substitute for intellectual curiosity …
“The prospect of domination of national scholars by federal employees, project assignments, and the power of money is omnipresent and must be taken seriously.
“But if we respect scientific research and discovery, as we should, we must also be aware of the same and opposite dangers that public policy itself could become the captivity of a scientific and technological elite.”
Whatever their findings on gene risk associations or even damage patterns – is that the NIH really just managed to generate a lot more data: the new study is not only “the greatest of all time,” but “the” greatest of all time “Speaking in NIH (and with a huge cast), but in terms of government-approved science, we’re no closer an inch to figuring out what is driving the autism epidemic, just as Collins told Congress all those years ago that if it weren’t: it’s all a giant leap into nowhere for humanity. Now, the autism rate in schools is maybe four or five times higher than it was then: it’s pretty hard to say because the NIH and CDC have failed to systematically address them to monitor.
As I began this journey, I remember a meeting in a freezing community hall in early 1997 that was addressed by Paul Shattock, now of the ESPA Autism Research Unit, Sunderland. One of the many and horrific things Paul told us was that 90% of the funding for the causes of autism was being swallowed up by useless genetic research, while the problem was now ten times as bad as it was ten years ago. He accurately predicted that it would go out. How appalling and cynical this charade was.
If you want to turn a disaster into a disaster and a disaster into a disaster, send to Collins !!!
John Stone is the UK and European Editor for Age of Autism
