Despite media grousing, the president's remarks state simply state an obvious idea. And the very last words of the MAHA Report — Precision Toxicology — light the path forward.
1. The evidence clearly shows a very large rate of increase in the rate of occurrence of autism, not an artifact of something else.
2. The popular media, science journalism and peer-reviewed science journals all generally pretend that #1 is not true, without evidence. That is a serious problem that is impeding much-needed progress. The real reasons for that denial are largely hidden.
3. We must get serious about finding treatments and preventable causes of the worst symptoms.
4. We should absolutely be studying gene-environment (GxE) interactions in autism etiology. It's obvious that GxE is a dominant factor.
Note: Heritability from twin studies does not mean inherited.
But is "precision toxicology" the same thing as GxE?
Here's a paper that explains The Precision Toxicology initiative:
The paper says that the basic approach is to find other animals with similar biological pathways to those in humans, plus isolated human cells, and do toxicology testing on them. Part of that involves looking at genetic susceptibility to toxins, which is effectively is GxE analysis.
This is great, Jill. MAHA can be dizzying, but like in Hollywood, bad press can still be good press.
I want the attention to find answers, but I also want that to translate into a) real dollars funding research and b) honest media brokers staying focused on the goal of getting those answers and less on whatever RFK says to confuse people about autism causation.
Jill, you're right - if our environmental exposures, pharmaceutical burdens, and heritable epigenetic shifts are converging on this generation of children, it’s not just inconvenient. It’s destabilizing. It would fracture institutions built on denial, force accountability into regulatory failures, and shatter a scientific orthodoxy that has abandoned curiosity for compliance. My studies on Marshall McLuhan and The Medium is the Message are that truth becomes the most disruptive force. The rise in autism is real, staggering, and demands explanation. In fact, it is this courage to hold both truths at once - vaccines don’t cause autism and autism rates are surging.
Media suppression of complex truths is not neutrality - it is complicity.
Sarah, superb comment and insight. The scientific establishment has truly abandoned curiosity for a stunningly superficial orthodoxy. The questions are bubbling up, but frankly if the grants aren’t flowing in that direction no one cares.
Unfortunately, I don't think precision toxicology is a new approach that will yield anything. It's just buzz words for the European Union to seem like it is blazing new paths.
But you've got the right idea. Finding the cause of autism does require an open-minded search using the tool of causal inference. We are hampered in that search by lack of data, and that's a long-standing problem that's hard to solve.
But another problem is that too many people wear blinders that keep them focused on a narrow path when they should be exploring the whole vista. Those blinders can be, and should be, taken off.
Yes the blinders should be taken off indeed. But precision toxicology is absolutely one path toward potential answers. I didn't get into the nitty gritty details in this short post but basically my field is genetic toxicology -- how do certain toxicants impact the molecular integrity of our (germline) genes and their transcriptional apparatus? These are sorts of questions we must be asking.
Yes, I see now your 2021 paper "Beyond Genes: Germline Disruption in the Etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders" where you discuss those issues. It's an excellent paper, full of food for thought. Good luck!
I still believe that my Autism, and that of all others like me, is caused by defective/mutated genes.
Sometimes these genes remain turned off and are passed along to offspring.
They may then be turned on, and progressively made worse, by any number of environmental assaults on the body. (Here the word “environmental” is all encompassing in scope.)
Time to talk about what REALLY may be linked to the autism surge: Screen Time. Yes—that simple omnipresent environmental factor that has been skyrocketing among children ages 0 to 5. As we knew in our hearts, little ones staring at digital devices for long periods is a developmentally destructive mixture. A global alliance of developmental experts is sounding the alarm about research that has emerged around the world in just the past 6 years. (Autistic-like symptoms and diagnosis are only one line item among developmental harms associated with early life excessive screen exposure.) There's a whole documentary about the autism and screens connection, appropriately titled "A Stone Unturned." See more at https://mybabygains.org and https://durablehuman.com/VirtualAutism and https://www.virtualautism.org/film
Yes to:
1. The evidence clearly shows a very large rate of increase in the rate of occurrence of autism, not an artifact of something else.
2. The popular media, science journalism and peer-reviewed science journals all generally pretend that #1 is not true, without evidence. That is a serious problem that is impeding much-needed progress. The real reasons for that denial are largely hidden.
3. We must get serious about finding treatments and preventable causes of the worst symptoms.
4. We should absolutely be studying gene-environment (GxE) interactions in autism etiology. It's obvious that GxE is a dominant factor.
Note: Heritability from twin studies does not mean inherited.
But is "precision toxicology" the same thing as GxE?
Here's a paper that explains The Precision Toxicology initiative:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378427423001807
The paper says that the basic approach is to find other animals with similar biological pathways to those in humans, plus isolated human cells, and do toxicology testing on them. Part of that involves looking at genetic susceptibility to toxins, which is effectively is GxE analysis.
This is great, Jill. MAHA can be dizzying, but like in Hollywood, bad press can still be good press.
I want the attention to find answers, but I also want that to translate into a) real dollars funding research and b) honest media brokers staying focused on the goal of getting those answers and less on whatever RFK says to confuse people about autism causation.
Jill, you're right - if our environmental exposures, pharmaceutical burdens, and heritable epigenetic shifts are converging on this generation of children, it’s not just inconvenient. It’s destabilizing. It would fracture institutions built on denial, force accountability into regulatory failures, and shatter a scientific orthodoxy that has abandoned curiosity for compliance. My studies on Marshall McLuhan and The Medium is the Message are that truth becomes the most disruptive force. The rise in autism is real, staggering, and demands explanation. In fact, it is this courage to hold both truths at once - vaccines don’t cause autism and autism rates are surging.
Media suppression of complex truths is not neutrality - it is complicity.
Sarah, superb comment and insight. The scientific establishment has truly abandoned curiosity for a stunningly superficial orthodoxy. The questions are bubbling up, but frankly if the grants aren’t flowing in that direction no one cares.
Unfortunately, I don't think precision toxicology is a new approach that will yield anything. It's just buzz words for the European Union to seem like it is blazing new paths.
But you've got the right idea. Finding the cause of autism does require an open-minded search using the tool of causal inference. We are hampered in that search by lack of data, and that's a long-standing problem that's hard to solve.
But another problem is that too many people wear blinders that keep them focused on a narrow path when they should be exploring the whole vista. Those blinders can be, and should be, taken off.
Yes the blinders should be taken off indeed. But precision toxicology is absolutely one path toward potential answers. I didn't get into the nitty gritty details in this short post but basically my field is genetic toxicology -- how do certain toxicants impact the molecular integrity of our (germline) genes and their transcriptional apparatus? These are sorts of questions we must be asking.
Yes, I see now your 2021 paper "Beyond Genes: Germline Disruption in the Etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders" where you discuss those issues. It's an excellent paper, full of food for thought. Good luck!
I still believe that my Autism, and that of all others like me, is caused by defective/mutated genes.
Sometimes these genes remain turned off and are passed along to offspring.
They may then be turned on, and progressively made worse, by any number of environmental assaults on the body. (Here the word “environmental” is all encompassing in scope.)
Time to talk about what REALLY may be linked to the autism surge: Screen Time. Yes—that simple omnipresent environmental factor that has been skyrocketing among children ages 0 to 5. As we knew in our hearts, little ones staring at digital devices for long periods is a developmentally destructive mixture. A global alliance of developmental experts is sounding the alarm about research that has emerged around the world in just the past 6 years. (Autistic-like symptoms and diagnosis are only one line item among developmental harms associated with early life excessive screen exposure.) There's a whole documentary about the autism and screens connection, appropriately titled "A Stone Unturned." See more at https://mybabygains.org and https://durablehuman.com/VirtualAutism and https://www.virtualautism.org/film
It’s not organic…