143Autism and Environmental Factors, First Edition. Omar Bagasra and Cherilyn Heggen.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
6
When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of
damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills
of halftruth.
Rachel Carson, 1962, Silent SpringAs we have discussed in previous chapters, many scientists believe that autism
is a genetic disease. They believe genetics is the cause of the wide of spectrum
of illness that we see in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children and are
impressed by numerous genetic defects found by the expert genetic analysts.
Despite the high heritability estimates for ASD, which are claimed to be from
70 to 90% concordant in maternal twins (monozygotic twins) and a little less in
fraternal twins (or dizygotic twins), there are notable differences in maternal
twin pairs. So, what they are seeing? Where is this 70–90% similarity (concord-
ance) coming from? These are highly trained experts who find genetic muta-
tions in up to 25% of ASD children. Why then can none of the mutations in
classic autism be directly linked to the spectrum? [1,2]. If we take out the well‐
characterized genetic diseases (which we believe should not be included as
part of the spectrum) such as Rett syndrome (X‐linked dominant pattern of
inheritance), Prader–Willi syndrome (deletion at 15q11‐q13), Angelman syn-
drome (deletion of maternal UBE3A), Smith–Magenis syndrome (deletion at
17p11.2), Down syndrome (trisomy of chromosome 21) and several other syn-
dromes, then we can still observe over 1,000 mutations in ASD children. None
of those mutations are linked to any specific disease, particularly not to ASD!
They are occurring in a developing fetus, in utero, anew (de novo), in a rela-
tively random fashion, not found in either of the parents. This suggests that
those genetic mutations (now numbered in thousands) are due to unknown
environmental factors and not inherited from either of the parents [3–6].
As we have shown previously, all of the fragrances that we have tested so far