Re:

Very nice list - but did you notice that his active work in academic medicine/research essentially petered out by around 1990? After that he mostly seems to have been involved in running his own foundation, providing "treatments" that got his medical license suspended (and retired altogether after results of his psychiatric exam were made known to the South Carolina medical board) and collecting millenium man awards for past glories. When you start padding your resume with Who's Who registries and being a "PhD Thesis Opponent at several schools in Holland, Sweden, Australia and France 1996" in order to have something to show past 1990, that's pretty desperate.

What's absent from that list is any evidence that he's done the quality work needed to get his ideas about vaccines accepted in the scientific community. Since he's got all those mainstream credentials, what happened?

An article in yesterday's New York Times provides a clue. Citing the example of James Watson (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, who just resigned from his lab position after claiming that African blacks were less intelligent than whites), it discusses other once-acclaimed scientists who went off the rails as they got older:

"Kary Mullis, after grabbing a piece of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, dove head first off the platform, expounding on the virtues of LSD and astrology and expressing his doubts about global warming, the ozone hole, and H.I.V. as the cause of AIDS. On the latter point he was following the lead of Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who still insists that AIDS is caused by recreational drug use and even by one of the pharmaceuticals used for treatment.

Iconoclasts at heart, the best scientists are faced with an occupational hazard: having left their mark on one small patch of ground, they are tempted to stir up trouble elsewhere.

“With my own advancing years, I’m mindful of the three different ways scientists can grow old,” Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom and president of the Royal Society, wrote in an e-mail message. The first two choices are either to become an administrator or to content yourself with doing Science that will probably be mediocre. (“In contrast to composers,” Dr. Rees observed, “there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.”) The third choice is to strike off half-cocked into unfamiliar territory — and quickly get in over your head. “All too many examples of this!” he lamented."

It's sad in Fudenberg's case. Once he must have had the respect of his scientific peers - now he's an antivax crank and quoted endlessly by fellow antivaxers who have no idea what Science is all about.



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