EUGENICS, CRUELTY AND AUTISM:
SPECTRUM 10K AND 'AUTISM SPEAKS'
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“Disabled people know that the quality-of-life judgements made about us by non-disabled people can prove not only inaccurate but deadly.”
SPECTRUM 10K---THE TRAGEDY OF AUTISM
Ableism, Anti-Blackness and modern day Eugenics:-
"Red Fightback believes that the Spectrum 10K study, like any other biological or medical reduction of disability, serves only to classify, exploit, and repress disabled people. As such, it stands within a long history of eugenic policy by the British state and the study's backers. We call for the immediate termination of Spectrum 10K and any similar studies, and for "research into autism" to instead focus on the material ways that racial capitalism continues to harm and draw profit from autistic people......if a single DNA base-pair was tomorrow identified that causes autism, the lives and social position of people with autism is in no way affected. This is obvious, because the treatment of autistic people does not occur because of this-or-that genetic structure but because of their position compared to that of the “normal”, abled worker, idealised by racial capitalism. However, in the longer term, such studies can and historically have been used to further the oppression of disabled people, by making their identification easier and by making pre-selective eugenic campaigns possible"
In August 2001, he and other researchers affiliated with the Cure Autism Now nonprofit created the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) ― a gene bank of more than 4,500 samples from children with autism and their families"
"In 2007, Autism Speaks completed its merger with Cure Autism Now (CAN).[4] CAN was founded in 1995 by Jonathan Shestack and Portia Iversen, the parents of an autistic child whose story is told in the book Strange Son. It was an organization of parents, doctors and scientists devoted to research to prevent, treat and cure autism.[74] Iversen and Shestack were invited to join NAAR's board but declined, impatient with what they considered NAAR's excess of caution in staying with the scientific establishment.[75] In 1997, CAN established the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange; CAN was successful in establishing AGRE despite an initially negative reaction from scientists who were concerned whether CAN could carry out rigorous work, and despite what CAN considered to be scientists' reluctance to share their data.[75] During its existence, Cure Autism Now provided more than $39 million for research grants and other programs. Its flagship programs included the AGRE, Autism Treatment Network, Clinical Trials Network, and Innovative Technology for Autism. It also funded education and outreach efforts.[4]"
In November 2013, Autism Speaks published an op-ed by co-founder Suzanne Wright. Autistic people and their families criticized the piece for using inaccurate statistics and giving an unrepresentative and exaggerated depiction of the lives of autistic people and their families.
Autism Speaks sponsored and distributes the short film Autism Every Day, produced by Lauren Thierry and Eric Solomon.[37] Autism Speaks staff member Alison Singer was reportedly criticized for a scene in which she said, in the presence of her autistic daughter, that when faced with having to place the girl in a school that she deemed to be terrible, she contemplated driving her car off a bridge with her child in the car.[41] Thierry said that these feelings were not unusual among non-autistic mothers of autistic children.[42] According to the book Battleground: The Media, Thierry instructed the families she interviewed not to do their hair, vacuum or have therapists present, and appeared with her film crew at homes without preliminary preparations, in order to authentically capture the difficulties of life with autistic children, such as autistic children throwing tantrums or physically struggling with parents.[41][42]
In the summer of 1881, Frenchman Gustave Le Bon entered the forbidding Tatras Mountains of southern Poland. A bearded man of 40, Le Bon was a Parisian polymath with an appetite for science, anthropology, and psychology. His mission in Poland was to locate and study the society of Podhaleans living in the Tatras. Using the portable cephalometer he invented years prior, Le Bon hoped to record the skull measurements of these curly blonde-haired, blue-eyed mountain people. Convinced of the relationship between race and intellect, Le Bon suspected that only a superior breed could thrive in the inhospitable Tatras — a race that must have evolved beyond their Polish peasant neighbors. How else could they have built a society on terrain so dangerous that even Russian generals avoided sending troops through the peaks?
Modern day eugenicist and promoter of sexist etc pseudoscience
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen FBA FBPsS FMedSci (born 15 August 1958)[2] is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mind-blindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995. In 1997, he formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015.
Feminist scientists, including Cordelia Fine, neuroscientist Gina Rippon, and Lise Eliot have opposed his extreme male brain theory of autism, calling it "neurotrash" and neurosexism.[36][37][38][39] Rippon also argues against using "male" and "female" for describing different types of brains, and that brain types do not correspond to genders.[37][40]
A book review published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences characterized The Essential Difference as "very disappointing" with a "superficial notion of intelligence", concluding that Baron-Cohen's major claims about mind-blindness and systemizing–empathizing are "at best, dubious".[41]
The developers of the software Baron-Cohen used for a 2009 study which reported that autistic individuals possessed superior visual acuity said that his results were impossible based on the technology used in the study. Baron-Cohen's team responded to this criticism by re-running the study and retracting the claim.[44][45][46]
In her 2010 book Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine used Baron-Cohen's views as an example of "neurosexism"; she also criticized some of the experimental work that Baron-Cohen claims supports his views as being methodologically flawed.[56][57][58]
In the 2017 book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, science journalist Angela Saini criticizes Cohen's research, arguing that he vastly overstates the significance of his findings and noting that the study on babies on which he bases much of his research has never been successfully replicated, while his studies of foetal testosterone levels have consistently failed to provide any evidence for his theories.[59][60][61]
Another neuroscientist, Gina Rippon, criticizes his theories in her book The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain.[62][63] She has criticized Baron-Cohen works, cataloguing his book The Essential Difference as "neurotrash" because of its weak research methods.[64] Reviewing her work for Nature, neuroscientist Lise Eliot has supported Rippon's approach, arguing "The hunt for male and female distinctions inside the skull is a lesson in bad research practice".[65] Rippon also argues against using "male" and "female" for describing different types of brains which do not correspond to genders.[63][66]
" University demanded Sanger return about 100 samples donated by the Nama people, as its MTA did not permit commercialization. "This conduct of the Wellcome Sanger Institute raises serious legal and ethical consequences," wrote Vice-Rector Eugene Cloete. The University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, which had gathered DNA from 100 people of Zulu descent, has also expressed concerns."
Recall that Nama people suffered eugenics (1904-8) as part of the
by German racial hygienists with the encouragement of leading British
eugenicists
Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., in 1951. These cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical research.[7] As was then the practice, no consent was required to culture the cells obtained from Lacks's treatment. Consistent with contemporary standards, neither she nor her family were compensated for their extraction or use.
(Near Cambridge, England)
