University of California Davis

If there's one thing that antivaccine activists share in common, it's the passionate (and as yet unproven) belief that "something" out there in the environment caused the "autism epidemic." Usually, that "something" thought to be vaccines, but with the utter failure of the vaccine-autism hypothesis to the point where it is considered soundly refuted, antivaccinationists have gotten a bit more—shall we say?—creative. Now it's something in the environment. Sometimes it's mercury, despite the utter lack of evidence that mercury in vaccines is even remotely linked to autism. Sometimes it's…
I've written a lot about Stanislaw Burzynski and what I consider to be his unethical use and abuse of institutional review boards and clinical trials. Before that, I used to regularly write about Mark and David Geier and their unethical use and abuse of IRBs and clinical trials. In both cases, I lamented how they could use their own IRBs stacked with their own cronies to rubberstamp scientifically and ethically dubious studies. Mark and David Geier got away with it for years. Stanislaw Burzynski got away with it for decades and, apparently, is still getting away with it to some extent. (His…