On 22 September 2025, USA’s Mad Emperor Donald Trump and his Secretary of Disease Robert F Kennedy Jr announced paracetamol to be the main cause of autism (followed by vaccines obviously). The FDA immediately promised to approve the B9-vitamin Leucovorin for autism therapy in children. The claim that autism is a mitochondrial disorder which can be cured with leucovorin, is based on the “research” by a certain Richard Frye.

Smut Clyde finally finished with his take on the story.

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A bit of Frye and Rossignol

By Smut Clyde

Apparently there was an press conference Imperial Audience the other week and the mad emperor Commodus Cæstigula opened his facehole to let a stream of words fall out; and once the courtiers had rearranged and paraphrased them in their perennial quest to wrest meaning and order out of chaos, they were apparently about the (a) cause of and (b) latest cure for autism. This was to meet a deadline set by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy (RFK) Jr on 17 April 2025 when he promised to have those interesting facts by September, by way of a crash research program comparable only to the Manhattan Project and the Race to the Moon (though not involving any actual research). They are, respectively, ‘Tylenol©‘ (because the number of syllables in ‘acetaminophen’ and ‘paracetamol’ exceed Trump’s capacity); and ‘leucovorin‘.

The shift of the cross-hairs away from ‘vaccines’ will have disappointed a few sincere antivaxxers. Don’t worry, about the leaders in the movement, though, like RFK’s old lobby-group ‘Child Health Defense’. They have already swiveled to new scams with which to fleece the flock, notably the cause of ‘health freedom’, which here means “government regulations and mandated proof of efficacy must be kept out of the sacred relationship between alt-med fraudsters and the pockets of their patients”.

To my shame, this ‘leucovorin’ flavour of snake-oil was new to me. It is evidently the vitamin-adjacent ‘folinic acid’, repackaged for the alt-med scammocopoeia and peddled by the usual pimps and grifters – including (rumour has it) RFK’s minion, the Great and Powerful Mehmet Oz (Dr Oz on TV). But the project of promoting and legitimising it by way of scholarly papers fell to a certain Richard Frye.

Frye was recently profiled in Transmitter, but here at For Better Science we followed him while it was still cool and he made a cameo appearance in a previous post (along with his like-minded colleague Dan Rossignol). So Leonid urged me to write more – which means more, and more. Be prepared for background material and Smutsplaining.

RFK’s other new policy platform – that acetaminophen taken in pregnancy can derail neural development in a fetus onto alternative tracks, with ‘autism’ as the later diagnosis – demands our attention first. Fortunately first-responder bloggers have already piled on (they noted the irony that a fever during pregnancy, if one cannot treat it with Tylenol, is an actual risk-factor for fetal misdevelopment).¹

The appeal for Trump and his Health Secretary is obvious… the theory directs ultimate blame for autism onto bad mothers who were so self-indulgent that they sought to avoid god-given pain when their central role, as birthing receptacles of Unborn Children, was to keep their wombs pristine and unsullied. “Women should suffer avoidable pain” is always a Plus in the Republic of Gilead. As for the scientific appeal, it is tenuous though not entirely absent.

I first encountered the proposed connection from the antivaxxer Stephanie Seneff, whose curious scholium of thought evolved from dumpster-diving in the VAERS database (led there by her MIT interest in natural-language search software). Her MDPI paper (Seneff et al 2012) invoked a correlation between two time-lines of increasing incidence. Of course this invites all manner of spurious associations, as Orac blogged (archived here). Indeed. a second pair of correlated increases gave Seneff an excuse to blame the herbicide glyphosate for causing autism (Samsel & Seneff 2013, again in MDPI) – following the ‘kettle logic‘ doctrine that bringing in an alternative explanation increases the plausibility of the first explanation rather than detracting from it. Wait, I’ll come back in; the same reasoning also allowed Seneff to credit vaccines as the third member of this malign synergistic axis-of-evil. One expects the fourth chief weapon of autism etiology to be an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, though that would violate the Rule of Three.

The conduit for these 2012 paper-shaped extrusions was a Special Issue of MDPI journal Entropy, titled “Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality“, and edited by John Oller Jr – a Creationist Linguist (I am not making this up), a discipline that differs from mainstream linguistics in rejecting concepts like “Sino-Tibetan” or “Proto-Uralic” because the Tower of Babel explains everything in terms of Goddidit. It may be that Oller introduced Seneff to entropic neologasms like ‘biosemantics’ that adorn her prose from 2012 on.

The Special Issue business model favoured by MDPI and Frontiers will be relevant later (even if not now). The volunteer Guest Editor assumes the responsibility of delivering a manifest of fee-paying authors to the publisher, vowing that their submissions shall be diligently peer-reviewed, in return for a fee waiver on the editor’s own contributions to the topic of choice. I do not need to explain how this appeals to any mouth in need of a megaphone.

Out of 11 papers in that “Biosemiotic Entropy” special issue, 7 were coauthored by Seneff, providing further theories about autism, for example “sulfates deficiency in both the mother and the child, brought on mainly by excess exposure to environmental toxins and inadequate sunlight exposure to the skin” (Hartzell & Seneff 2012), or “as a chronic low-grade encephalopathy, associated with excess exposure to nitric oxide, ammonia and glutamate in the central nervous system” (Seneff et al 2013).

Oller and Seneff then teamed up in a veritable Voltron of Derp with Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic (read about this duo above), to write more extrusions in 2013 and 2014 that are full of entropic interfacial waterbending bafflegab and as mad as six wolverines after a week-long methamphetamine bender, too bonkers for even the cloaca maxima of MDPI… forcing our authors to the ultimate recourse of OMICS (Shaw et al 2013) and Hindawi (Shaw et al 2014).

Don’t worry, none of this is to the point and it will not be in the final exam, but it does provide a rare example of the “argumentum ad cross-section-through-an-M&M”. The COVID-19 pandemic was a useful distraction from Seneff’s 2014 prediction that “by 2025, one in two children will be autistic“; it was also an opportunity to make up new material.

It used to be that if you asked for more reality-grounded evidence for a Tylenol link, Liew et al (2016) would loom up. The authors there looked at 64,322 children from the Danish National Birth Cohort, controlled as best as they could for some confounding factors that might affect autism diagnoses and propensity for painkillers, and reported a slightly increased odds-ratio linking maternal acetaminophen use with a specific subgroup of ‘autism + hyperkinesia’. This was back in the Dark Ages when p-hacking was the norm rather than pre-registering one’s design for data-collection and analysis, so the possibility remains that when the authors couldn’t coax an association with autism per se from their data, they sliced and diced the sample into various subgroups until something rose to the threshold of significance.

At any rate the question is academic (the best kind of question!), because Ahlqvist et al JAMA (2024) rocked up with a much larger cohort of 2½-million impeccably-documented Swedish kids and used this one simple sibling-control trick to eliminate even those stubborn hard-to-shift confounders. If there had been a significant signal, they would have found it.

“But Uncle Smut,” asks the unconvinced reader, “If Ahlqvist et al were so conclusive, how did Prada et al (2025) conclude from their literature review that acetaminophen is indeed a risk factor that mothers-to-be should avoid?” – that being the finding brandished by RFK et al at their press conference. Fortunately the faster-working bloggers have already given Prada et al the piñata treatment; the comments on the PubPeer thread are also dispositive.

The way to reach such a finding, it seems, is to give as much weight to under-powered conclusion-driven studies with shonky methodologies, and to gold-standard studies with huge samples and methodologies not determined by the intended results. This commendably non-elitist approach to weighting seems to be the default scheme for literature reviewing in environmental toxicology, but in medical / therapeutic syntheses one normally does weight studies by reliability.

Double-dipping helps: you can include multiple papers that reported on the same cohort of children. Here, as well as Liew et al (2016) we find Liew et al (2014) and Inoue et al (2020) being cited. Then those Danish kids were counted a fourth time in Prada et al. by way of Alemany et al (2021), who meta-analysed them with five much smaller cohorts from elsewhere in Europe. Second author of those Danish studies (Beata Ritz) was also second author here and knew what she was doing.

More attention has been paid to the lead author of Prada et al.: Andrea Baccarelli, Dean of Public Health at Harvard, Professor of Environmental Health, and wedded to the Tylenol etiology. In 2023 he was paid $150000+ for expert-witnessing (because of course people sued Tylenol’s manufacturers), and while being well-paid to expound one’s professional opinions does not shape those opinions, it is a persuasive argument to hold them more strongly. The judge was unimpressed:

“U.S. District Court Judge Denise L. Cote dismissed the case last year due to a lack of scientific evidence, throwing out Baccarelli’s testimony in the process.

“He cherry-picked and misrepresented study results and refused to acknowledge the role of genetics in the etiology” of autism spectrum disorder or ADHD, Cote wrote in her decision, which the plaintiffs have since appealed.”

Harvard Crimson, September 2025

Even RFK is aware that the data are not on his side and has announced plans to create better ones.

Now under-powered half-baked studies are like crank theories, in that one is never enough. If you allow (say) the Flat-Earth Cosmos into your mind, it invites Chemtrails² and Aliens and the Altaic Language Phylum to join it until your cranium resembles the antlers of Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose [one of these things is not as cranky as the others]; and in the same way, once Prada et al. had occupied RFK’s brain (filling the gap left by a brain-worm) it felt lonely and called out for the company of “Circumcision-Causes-Autism‘ and ‘Falling Sperm Counts / Race Extinction’. A trend is emerging here, about ‘endangered manhood’ as well as ‘endangered white supremacy’, and I confidently expect the next press conference to dwell on the dangers of soy milk.

RFK Jr: "Today the average teenager in this country has 50% of the sperm count, 50% of the testosterone of a 65 year old man. Our girls are hitting puberty 6 years early … our parents aren't having children."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-16T20:23:35.124Z

RFK retconned the circumcision studies into his larger crusade with the argument that in fact circumcision is a confounding factor that does not cause autism directly, but there is the indirect causation that a circumcised boy will need painkillers. How acetaminophen causes autism in infants is anyone’s guess, requiring a different mechanism from the equally unexplained prenatal-exposure claim, but RFK does not care whether any of this is true. It is enough that infants (like pregnant women) should suffer avoidable pain, and that Bad Mothers can be blamed if they don’t inflict it on them.

With all that preamble now pre-ambled, we can return at last to the amble itself, or possibly the postamble, in the form of Richard Frye. And to his credit (I must say for fairness), Frye is not comfortable with the sudden ascent of his profile. An endorsement from RFK would have anyone looking back over their lives and rueing each of the regrettable choices that led them to a position to receive it… whatever the true goal of the Health Secretary, it is not to improve the lives of autists and their families.

Nor is Frye enamored of the Tylenol connection – not in its prenatal-exposure version, anyway. Prenatal aetiologies in general leave less room for treatability, and Frye is interested in autism only in-as-far as he can cure it. So when we first encountered Frye and Rossignol – in the context of Frontiers journals as force multipliers for amplifying heterodox approaches to autism, with little danger of peer-review gatekeeping – they were curing autism with (a) chelation, and (b) hyperbaric oxygen (HBO, Rossignol et al 2012). Both modalities of Alt-Med are known to kill patients, but this is a price the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) community are willing to pay.

“The Tribune found children undergoing daylong infusions of a blood product that carries the risk of kidney failure and anaphylactic shock. Researchers in the field emphatically warn that the therapy should not be used to treat autism.

Children are repeatedly encased in pressurized oxygen chambers normally used after scuba diving accidents, at a cost of thousands of dollars. This unproven therapy is meant to reduce inflammation that experts say is little understood and may even be beneficial. […]

Rossignol declined to be interviewed for this story.”

Chicago Tribune, August 2021

Chelation, because mercury, lingering in the system and disrupting various metabolic cascades. The rationale for HBO is that autism can be a symptom of mitochondrial malfunction… the wee beasties are not burning fuel properly, coining too little of the energy-currency ATP in every cell of the body, which has most impact on the special-needs neurons in the brain. More oxygen → more fuel burned → more ATP. ‘Mitochondrial dysfunction’ has become a Worship Word in the Alt-Med movement (often accompanied by “vaccine damage” as another Worship Word), with RFK Jr capable of sniffing it out by physiognomy alone. Notably – by way of a predatory journal – “Evidence of Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Autism and Implications for Treatment” (Rossignol & Bradstreet 2008).

This spawned a thriving market in mitochondrial supplements… these really deserve their own post, to finish the trilogy tetralogy that began with mitochondrial biophotons, mitochondrial transplants and the Mitochondriac Redox papermill (somehow omitting the Deuterium-depleted Litewater Diet).

Frye’s involvement in the celebrated Poling Case was new to me (h/t Transmitter). The Poling’s daughter ‘HP’ possessed an exceeding rare mitochondrial mutation which flared up (exacerbated, it may be, by a fever following a cluster of delayed vaccines; or by the recurring ear infections that delayed the vaccines) as a post-encephalitic syndrome with some autism-like symptoms. Frye Expert-Witnessed in favour of this chain of causation during the parents’ bid for vaccine-injury compensation for HP, and co-authored Poling père‘s case-study about her (Poling et al 2006).

He delivered similar testimony in other vaccine-injury hearings, e.g. that of ‘MSB’, where Special Master Campbell-Smith found Frye’s diagnostic skills insufficient when compared with neurologist witnesses who found neither malfunctioning mitos in MSB nor evidence of post-vaccine regression. The Special Master’s decision was upheld by Judge Wolski in an appeal to the Court of Federal Claims.

“Respondent’s other expert, Dr. Jones, submitted a report which also criticizes Dr. Frye’s theories of causation. See Resp’t’s Ex. C. Doctor Jones’s report primarily focuses on Dr. Frye’s theory of oxidative stress, rejecting that theory as “not sound,” and as reflecting “some degree of obfuscation.” See id. at 4. Doctor Jones explains that oxidants are essential for normal cell signaling, and opines that the scientific evidence does not support the proposition that vaccines can stimulate enough oxidation to cause the symptoms that [M.S.B.] experienced in the time frame in which her symptoms occurred.”

US Court of Federal Claims, July 2014

Another Worship Word is ‘Oxidative Stress’ (along with ‘glutathione’ and ‘MTHR”); again, functioning as a code for ‘heavy metal poisoning’, i.e. ‘vaccines’. You see cutaway schematic diagrams of cell structure that show the various organelles, but one key feature of cell structure they omit are the scary DANGER – BIOHAZARD – RADIATION warning signs plastered all over the mitochondrial membranes… for inside the mitos, confined for the safety of the rest of the cell, chemical reactions of frightening blast-furnace intensity are spitting out and then defusing no end of Reactive Oxygen Species. A wild rumpus of free radicals, superoxides and such. ‘Oxidative Stress’ happens when too much of this ROS industrial waste leaks out, or when the enzymes that manage it are impaired; in general this is not a Good Thing, and I am sceptical that flooding one’s metabolism with additional oxygen is likely to ameliorate it.

Now, in DAN! circles of autism defeaters, it is axiomatic that trapped inside every autist, a normal child with normal cognition is struggling to get out – only needing the right drug or therapy to be released. Just a matter of rearranging the jigsaw pieces to make them fit properly. The ‘right intervention’ might be secretin, or suramin – or TMS, GcMAF pixie-dust, or stem-cell injections, and if the placebo value of the first five cures wears off – there is always a sixth. Jeff Bradstreet, prominent DAN! doctor and broad-spectrum grifter, began his autism-curing career with [I am not making this up] the cultural-heritage therapeutic modality known as ‘exorcism’.

So RFK surrounded himself at his press conference with a human shield of mothers whom he had convinced that the Gubblement was about to unveil the High Magic – long-concealed by the machinations of previous administrations – that will finally bring their real children back. Mothers sharing a Origin Story where the Vaccine Fairies stole away their infants and replaced them with changelings. How he convinced them is anyone’s guess, when it’s no secret that the Health Secretary’s plan for Make America Healthy Again is (a) let unhealthy burdens die, and (b) Aktion-T4 was too woke.³ Anyway, here we are with Folinic Acid (FA).

It is time to introduce a central character in the narrative: one Edward Quadros. The Muse of Bad Ideas blessed Quadros with the special insight that autism is a diabetes of the brain, as it were, with folic acid as the missing piece in the jigsaw – either by deficiency or because cells lost sensitivity to it. The latter ultimately stemming from auto-antibodies latching onto the folate receptors and impeding them.

• “Autoantibodies to Folate Receptors in the Cerebral Folate Deficiency Syndrome” (Ramaekers et al 2005).

The muse delivered the same message elsewhere:

• “Cerebral Folate Deficiency in Autism Spectrum Disorders” (Rossignol & Frye 2011) – Not a published paper, but a presentation to a grifters’ trade-fair.
• “Folate receptor alpha autoimmunity and cerebral folate deficiency in autism spectrum disorders” (Rossignol & Frye 2012).
• “Cerebral folate receptor autoantibodies in autism spectrum disorder” (Frye et al 2013).

There is evidence for this explanation, and also a clinical touchstone for the suitability of FA in a given case… both are the FRAT, Folate Receptor Antibody Test.⁴ The FRAT was not testing for loudness, beer-kegs, and privilege. It was produced and marketed by Iliad Neurosciences, which was basically E.V. Quadros (who also created the test).

This is where Frye re-enters the story. In his capacity as the Iliad Neurosciences Scientific Advisory Board, Frye managed the clinical trials and wrote the papers to validate both test and therapy.

• “Blocking and Binding Folate Receptor Alpha Autoantibodies Identify Novel Autism Spectrum Disorder Subgroups” (Frye et al 2016).
• “Folinic acid improves verbal communication in children with autism and language impairment: a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial” (Frye et al 2018).

The 2018 paper says nothing about the curious disruptions to the clinical trial it reports. The entry in the trials registry (NCT01602016) has it as “terminated by the sponsor as a result of investigator non-compliance“: the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (the institution overseeing things) pulled the plug when Frye kept changing protocols and they could not oversee or confirm what was going on (see Transmitter). An aspirational ‘multi-site’ aspect was abandoned early, while an intended third phase where placebo and intervention groups alike would receive FA was lost in the upheaval.

A second clinical trial is recorded in the registry (NCT02839915), but no results are reported so far. It crashed and burned as well for reasons that I lack the patience to explore… suffice to say that Frye changed his place of employment again, leaving Phoenix Children’s Hospital to join the staff at Dan Rossignol’s Rossignol Medical Center, which specialises in non-specialising.

In the absence of papers, the evidence for the efficacy of FA / Leucovorin includes:

• A trial in San Francisco (NCT03771560) with only 12 participants, so one can’t expect any improvements to become statistically significance (SPOILER: they didn’t).
• A trial in India (Panda et al 2024) which was – if the PubPeer commentary is any guide – a dumpster-fire in a dumpster parked outside the Hot Garbage Factory.
• A trial in Pakistan with 22 + 22 participants. Control and intervention groups were not well-matched, and no placebo for the control group, but the results encouraged the researchers at least (Shah et al 2021).
• A trial in France (NCT02551380). No progress reports since March 2017.
• Two other Frye trials, NCT04060017 and NCT04060030, open to children with ASD and Autism respectively – both started in 2020 and are still recruiting as of June 2025.
• NCT00692315 and NCT00572741. S. Jill James (a Bradstreet colleague) treated children for ‘oxidative stress’, first with a combination of FA and Vitamin B12; then with FA, B12, and umpteen other supplement pills – in the hope of ‘detoxification’, and improved glutathione redox activity.

But I seem to have wandered from my point here, which is that Conflicts of Interest are as possible in Little Pharma as they are in Big Pharma. Frye is conscientious about disclosing them:

“Richard E. Frye is funded by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and Autism Speaks and receives support from the Turnabout for Autism, the Brain Foundation, the Autism Research Institute and Zynerba Pharmaceuticals. He is on the advisory boards of Iliad Neurosciences and NeuroNeeds.”

Jensen et al 2022, “Modern Biomarkers for Autism Spectrum Disorder: Future Directions”.

“‘NeuroNeeds’?” wonders the reader. “That is a new one on me!”, as Lemmy exclaimed when he counted his moles in the mirror.

NeuroNeeds is (as any fule kno) a company set up by a Richard Boles to supply “A Wide Spectrum Nutritional Supplement” for improving “Mitochondrial Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)“. Any fule kno this from reading the title of yet another clinical trial (NCT03835117) – started when Frye was still at Phoenix Children’s Hospital but more-or-less carried over to his new Rossignol Center affiliation. The treatment regimen consisted of 33 unspecified ingredients powdered together plus gel capsules of Ubiquinol, and its very existence displays a disturbing lack of faith in the efficacy of FA per se, but that is not my problem.

The Trial became a paper by Boles and Frye (Hill et al 2025), which Myrothecium inundatum unpicked over at PubPeer. Notably, the Conflict of Interests with NeuroNeeds was confined to Boles. It would have been better (M. inundatum suggests) if Frye had acknowledged his own debt to NeuroNeeds as company advisor. A full disclosure would also include the fact that another advisor for the company was Frye’s employer Dan Rossignol, who also became the trial’s sponsor. M. inundatum further wonders why only 16 children were recruited rather than 50 as planned; and whether all the research was really conducted at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, given the date of Frye’s displacement from his office there.

Iliad itself is no longer extant. It went T.-U. some time in 2022, and was reborn by Iliad’s co-founder Steve Tsetsekos as ReligenDX. The FRAT test is sold for $295 a piece; Bloomberg quoted Tsetsekos that since Trump’s leucovorin prescription from September 2025, the FRAT “demand has surged by 400% to 500%“.

Someone must have the IP rights to Quadros’ recipe, for Frye offers the FRAT test on his website. But one thing still missing, even after the company rebirth, is the independent evidence that FRAT results mean anything – and without that, the whole house of cards collapses. Or Tower of Babel if you prefer. Or even the Topless Towers of Ilium.

Most of the Leucovorin pimps don’t see the need for FRAT, of course. The only diagnostic test required to see if a client’s autism ensued from folate insensitivity, and might benefit from supplements, is whether the family can pay for them.

Postamble

Speaking of ‘non-specialising’ at the Rossignol Clinic, Frye teamed up with Rossignol, NeuroNeeds founder Boles, and a Shannon Rose to promote this omnium-gatherum philosophy by Guest-Editing ‘A Personalized Medicine Approach to the Diagnosis and Management of Autism Spectrum Disorder‘ (2020-2022). This being a Special Issue of The Journal of Personalized Medicine (MDPI). As promised up-stream.

Which is to say, he progressed from Frontiers and is now a power-user of MDPI. Three other Special Issues edited for The Journal of Personalized Medicine! Two more for Gene! Dorothy Bishop is not a fan:

“The special issue “A Personalized Medicine Approach to the Diagnosis and Management of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Beyond Genetic Syndromes” appears largely to be a vehicle for papers by the guest editor Richard E. Frye, who co-authored 3/4 editorials, 3/9 articles and 1/1 review in this collection.  He was editor but not an author on the paper by D’Adamo et al, which is categorised as a “case report”.”

While preparing this post I tried to read all of Frye’s extensive academic output, without success, but it gave me an excuse to procrastinate. I learned that before FA, there was Tetrahydrobiopterin… imagine Trump trying to pronounce that.

• “Tetrahydrobiopterin as a Novel Therapeutic Intervention for Autism” (Frye et al 2010).
• “Tetrahydrobiopterin Deficiency in Autism Spectrum Disorder” (Frye 2014).

And melatonin, because there is always a sixth cure.

• “Melatonin in autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis” (Rossignol & Frye 2011).
• “Melatonin in Autism Spectrum Disorders” (Rossignol & Frye 2014).

Back in 2013 the hipster cure for autism was Suramin (because mitochondria!) despite its scary side-effects and its failure to cross the blood-brain barrier. It was introduced by Robert Naviaux, who was previously known for prescribing dark chocolate for mitochondrial failure he and his UC San Diego colleagues observed in type 2 diabetes (Taub et al 2012). The episode is not entirely to the point but it illustrates the sense of urgency encountered in the autism-curing community – justifying desperate remedies (indeed, the more desperate the remedy, the more daring and heroic the doctor who prescribes it). So a since-deleted press release from UCSD quoted Naviaux on the occasion of Naviaux et al 2012:

“Our (cell danger) theory suggests that autism happens because cells get stuck in a defensive metabolic mode and fail to talk to each other normally, which can interfere with brain development and function, […] Simply put, when cells stop talking to each other, children stop talking.”

Naviaux then started a clinical trial (NCT02508259) with ten autistic boys, of whom five were treated with suramin; the absence of significant results was predictably reported as a success (Naviaux et al 2017). He enters the present story by way of a shared clinical proof that autism is caused by broken mitochondria:

• “Autistic disorder with complex IV overactivity: A new mitochondrial syndrome” (Frye & Naviaux 2013).

You may enjoy this curious bibliometric paper:

• “A review of research trends in physiological abnormalities in autism spectrum disorders” (Rossignol & Frye 2011).

It belongs to a fashion-commentary genre where one takes a snapshot of a research field and extracts Hot Topics that are generating most papers. The exercise is harmless enough unless readers mistake ‘generativity’ as a proxy for ‘likelihood of being correct’, which is how the Amyloid Hypothesis displaced all other avenues of Alzheimers research, and why non-coding RNAs are a thing.

There was a flirtation with the perennial “Vaccines → Oxidative Stress” trope. Our man backed away from it before people could ask awkward questions about the removal of thimerosal from vaccines and the failure of autism rates to change.

• “Increased Susceptibility to Ethylmercury-Induced Mitochondrial Dysfunction in a Subset of Autism Lymphoblastoid Cell Lines” (Shannon Rose, … Frye, … S. Jill James, 2015).

Above I linked to the regrettable collaboration between Frye, Rossignol, and Jeff Bradstreet (before he left this world from an overdose of Bullet when the FBI started sniffing around his dealings with GcMAF). But no harm in citing it again.

• “Hyperbaric oxygen treatment in autism spectrum disorders” (Rossignol, Bradstreet, … & Frye, 2012).

To wrap up: If other researchers can’t find signals of mitochondrial dysfunction in the brains of autists, it’s because they’re using the wrong tests. The wrongness of those tests is shown by their inability to find the signals.

• “Substantial Problems with Measuring Brain Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy” (Rossignol & Frye 2012).

If this post had been primarily about Dan Rossignol rather than Richard Frye there would be a cheap crack here about him being way out over his skis.

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Feetnotes

1. What caused autism before the invention of paracetamol remains a mystery. It was common enough 150 years ago for John Langdon Down to codify autism as a clinical entity in his 1877 Lettsomian Lectures. He also described ‘savant syndrome’, and we are free to imagine that Arthur Conan Doyle attended the lectures (or read the print version from 1887) and was inspired to create the character of Sherlock Holmes. He failed to coin the label ‘autism’, though, which rolls off the tongue better than “Down’s Other Syndrome”. ↩︎
2. No, wait, chemtrails are RFK Jr’s next target, as he directs the HHS to focus its efforts and resources on eliminating them. ↩︎
3. “Health care is a fundamental right for anyone who deserves it,” is the policy of the US administration. Also, chronic or acute illness is always brought upon the victims by their self-indulgence or self-neglect, so they don’t deserve health care. ↩︎
4. I am reminded of the central role of blood tests in the chelation belief system – see Tsouderos & Callahan again. Also, “Blood Work” for bonus Bradstreet. ↩︎

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