But none of these have enjoyed the kind of press devoted to one small, inconclusive study that suggested a link between vaccination and autism. “We live in a media culture,” the writer Maria Popova observes, “that warps seeds of scientific understanding into sensationalist, definitive headlines about the gene for obesity or language or homosexuality and maps where, precisely, love or fear or the appreciation of Jane Austen is located in the brain—even though we know that it isn’t the clinging to answers but the embracing of ignorance that drives science.”
