Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Although it might seem far-fetched, imagine the following scenario: A group of unscrupulous doctors opens a clinic in Switzerland that performs lobotomies for the treatment of autism. The doctors who run the clinic don’t call the procedure a lobotomy (that ship has sailed); they call it something else, like the “Fresh Start” procedure. The doctors put up an attractive website that explains how the outpatient procedure takes only a few minutes to perform and involves severing the nerve fibers in the brain that cause autism. They include a few parent testimonials stating that after the procedure their children’s language doubled, and then they open their doors. If a man claiming to be a billion-year-old god from another galaxy can get people to line up for a therapy that crosses the line into child abuse, then doctors in some European clinic should expect at least equal success with a quick-fix surgical procedure. It hasn’t happened yet, but there is no reason to believe that it couldn’t. Desperate to do something, anything, to cure the incurable, we continue to punish the afflicted.