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برچسب: Scientist

  • RFK Jr. Fires Scientist Studying Environmental Causes of Autism

    RFK Jr. Fires Scientist Studying Environmental Causes of Autism


    ProPublica exposed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a complete phony and know-nothing. He claims that he will get to the root causes of autism. He has said for decades that the singular cause of autism is vaccines.

    But he fired the scientist studying environmental causes of autism and dismantled her program.

    He won’t rest until he can find a scientist who agrees with him. That’s not how science works. It’s based on experimental evidence, not ideology.

    ProPublica wrote:

    Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.

    Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer. 

    McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done. 

    “That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.

    As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.

    For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.

    He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.

    In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”

    Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”

    As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism…

    The article goes on to describe the important research conducted by McCanlies and her colleagues at NIOSH into the relationship between exposure to certain toxins and autism.

    Secretary Kennedy was obviously ignorant of the work these scientists had been doing for years on causes of autism.

    The researchers were pleased to know that the toxins they had identified as related to autism were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency. But then came the shocking news that EPA leader Lee Zeldin was removing restrictions on some of the worst chemicals.

    Meanwhile, Kennedy seems determined to establish a causal link between vaccines and autism. This theory has been thoroughly debunked by scientists.



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  • Federal Judge Restores Visa to Russian Harvard Scientist

    Federal Judge Restores Visa to Russian Harvard Scientist


    I wrote a post about this case a week ago. A scientist at Harvard, who left Russia as an anti-war dissenter, was detained at Logan Airport in Boston on her return from France because she had scientific samples that she did not declare. The samples–frog embryos on slides–posed no danger to anyone. She was immediately stripped of her visa, arrested, and sent to Louisiana to await deportation. A federal judge just granted her bail.

    I recall that Trump campaigned on a pledge to deport rapists, murderers, “the worst of the worst.” This young woman is a scientist who is working to find the causes of cancer. Why does he want to deport her?

    The New York Times reported:

    A federal judge on Wednesday said she would grant bail to Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard University, in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country.

    “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing.

    The judge said the available evidence suggested that the samples Ms. Petrova carried into the country were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.” She also said that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.

    Unlike other high-profile deportation cases involving academics, Ms. Petrova’s began with a customs violation. Returning to Boston from a vacation in France, she agreed to carry back samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School.

    When the samples were discovered during an inspection of Ms. Petrova’s baggage at Logan Airport, the customs official canceled her visa on the spot and started deportation proceedings. She was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, where she remained for more than three months.

    “This is kind of a circular process, because it was the government that revoked her visa,” Judge Reiss said on Wednesday. “And it’s essentially saying, ‘We revoked your visa, now you have no documentation and now we’re going to place you in removal proceedings.’” 

    She concluded that “what happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” and that if she did not take action in the case “there will be no determination” that Ms. Petrova’s constitutional rights had been violated.

    “Bail is necessary to make the habeas remedy effective in this case,” she said.

    However, it is unclear when the government will allow Ms. Petrova’s release on bail, or whether it will pursue its plan to deport her to Russia. The case has attracted high-level attention from officials in the Trump administration, who took an unusual step earlier this month, after Judge Reiss indicated she planned to release Ms. Petrova.

    Hours after that hearing, the Department of Justice unsealed felony smuggling charges against Ms. Petrova based on her failure to declare the scientific samples, and Ms. Petrova was arrested and transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in Louisiana, where she remains. 

    Ms. Petrova’s next opportunity for release will come after she is transferred to Massachusetts to face the smuggling charges. But the government also issued a detainer on immigration charges, raising the possibility that, if a judge grants her bail in the criminal case, the government could ask ICE to detain her once again.

    Judge Reiss asked Jeffrey M. Hartman, the attorney representing the Department of Justice at the bail hearing, whether that would happen. 

    He said he did not think so, citing the recent releases of Mohsen Mahdawi, a student organizer at Columbia University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University.

    “My understanding of the Ozturk and Mahdawi cases is that the government has not re-detained those noncitizens, and I would expect the government to adhere to the same course of action,” Mr. Hartman said. 

    Ms. Petrova, 31, the graduate of an elite Russian physics and technology institute, was recruited in 2023 to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School studying the earliest stages of cell development. The Kirschner Lab, where she worked, is exploring ways to repair damage to cells that lead to diseases like cancer.

    Ms. Petrova has admitted that she failed to declare the samples. Her lawyer has argued that this would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction, punishable with a fine. 

    When Ms. Petrova told the customs officer that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there, she was transferred to ICE custody to wait for an asylum hearing, a process that can take months or years.



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