Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

You might think that the link between these behaviours in mice and autism in humans is, to say the least, somewhat tenuous. You might also wonder whether such a tiny number of donors could possibly be representative of people with autism in general.81 Nevertheless, the authors were happy to draw an impressive conclusion: ‘microbiota-based interventions such as probiotics [or] fecal microbiota transplantation … may offer a timely and tractable approach to addressing the lifelong challenges of [autism spectrum disorder].’82 They put out a press release discussing the ‘profound’ effects of the faecal transfer, claiming again that their research implied that probiotics might one day be used to treat the symptoms of autism.83 This was all the purest hype. Even setting aside both the study’s trifling sample size and its rather questionable assumptions about the equivalence of human and mouse behaviour, the experiment had at no point tested the power of probiotics or transplants to reduce any of the supposed rodent-autism symptoms – let alone the ‘equivalent’ in humans.