Feynman on the Spectrum

I wanted to write about something else, but I feel compelled to write about this. A user named PhilCommander2 posted a video on YouTube (http://www youtube.com/watch?v=jRHizP9HwZM – put a dot between the ‘www’ and ‘youtube’ when you use the URL) advocating the use of nutritional supplements and special diets for treating autism.

What irritated me about his presentation was his appropriation of Richard Feynman’s name for his cause. I never knew Feynman except through his works and through talking to people who knew him, but I can be certain that were he alive to see this video, he would have been appalled by it.

Feynman was well known for a lot of things, such as his work on the Manhattan Project and his efforts to unravel quantum electrodynamics (for which he received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965). What I want to cite here is a speech that he gave to the 1974 graduating class at Caltech, often referred to as “Cargo-Cult Science”. (See Wikipedia:Cargo Cult Science and “Cargo Cult Science” (text).)

In a nutshell, Feynman was expressing his frustration with people who use the trappings of science in order to do their research, but who fail to use anything close to the scientific method in order to do so. To illustrate his point, he offered the example of the cargo cults that arose in New Guinea and the South Pacific after the Second World War.

Briefly put, during the War, the United States Military had established bases on many of the islands of the South Pacific in order to prosecute the war against the Japanese. The people living on these islands were very impressed by the amount of supplies (“cargo”) brought in by ship and plane. When the War ended, so did the cargo.

Quite naturally, they wanted the cargo to keep flowing. Instead of doing something productive so that they would have money to trade for cargo, many of these people went ahead and fashioned airstrips and port facilities out of whatever materials they had on hand. A “control tower” would be built of bamboo and wood, and a man would sit inside with a pair of “headphones” made from a coconut. Others would wear “uniforms” styled after the soldiers and marines they saw consuming the cargo. All the while, they would wait for the airplanes and ships to arrive, filled with wonderful cargo.

Feynman considered many people in the social sciences to be practitioners of “cargo cult science”. He accused them of using sloppy methodologies and forming half-baked theories that would not stand up to rigorous inspection. He held a particular scorn for psychology, considering them to be a bunch of quacks.

It should be noted that in the 1970s, Feynman did pay frequent visits to the Esalen Institute. He did think that some of the things they promoted were a bit silly, but for the most part, they were harmless cranks who were not hurting anyone. He was mostly attracted by the seminars they sponsored, which many bright people from all walks of life attended. The people there had an honest curiosity about his work and he felt comfortable and relaxed around them. The institute in is Big Sur, California and the surroundings are absolutely spectacular. If you ever have an opportunity to visit, by all means do so.

Shortly after he won the Nobel prize, a book editor tried to solicit Feynman’s interest in being included in a book about Jewish Nobelists. Feynman came from a Jewish background, but by this time, he thought of himself an atheist (or at the very least agnostic) and did not consider Judaism as part of his identity. He politely turned her down, explaining that he had stopped subscribing to Jewish religious views when he was thirteen.

The editor persisted in trying to get Feynman to contribute to her book. Feynman finally had to explain to her that even a pro-semetic book like the one she wanted to publish was an exercise in prejudice, since Jews did not have a monopoly on intelligence, virtue or wisdom. (See pages 234-236 of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005) Basic Books, ed. Michelle Feynman.)

In 1986, NASA asked Feynman to serve on the Rogers Commision, the board looking into the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. The NASA bureaucrats offered plenty of technical gobbledygook, presumably to confuse the commissioners and deflect their investigation away from errors committed by management. Feynman cut straight to the heart of the matter, the O-rings used to seal the rocket motors, and gave a demonstration of how and why they failed. His report can be found here.

After seeing the video and knowing a little about Feynman’s character, I hope you can see why I am so upset about this. Nutritional supplements might not necessarily cause any harm, but there is absolutely no evidence that they will cure autism. None. If someone came and made the claim that nutritional supplements can cure autism, Feynman would have been the first to want to know how this was discovered. Was a randomized, double-blind experiment performed? Were other factors investigated? How were the data collected and analyzed?

It would appear that the research behind this theory lacked any sort of rigor. I am backed up in this by a report in the April 2007 issue of Scientific American (The Autism Diet, p. 32). The article states that

Unfortunately, the initial studies of diets that eliminate gluten and casein were badly flawed. Although half a dozen research groups reported improvements in behavior and cognition in autistic children after several months on the elimination diets, nearly all the studies lacked control subjects, individuals who continued to digest the suspect proteins. Because the researchers did not compare the restricted-diet children with a control group, they could not specify whether the behavioral and cognitive gains actually resulted from the diets, from the children’s maturation, or from other therapies conducted at the same time.

There you have it. There are a number of new studies being conducted at the University of California Davis, the University of Rochester and the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School that will be using a more scientifically rigorous methodology; the results will be available sometime in the Spring of 2008.

I find it a bit upsetting that many parents do not want to enroll their children into these studies, because they fear that their kids will be part of the control group. Robin Hansen at UC Davis wanted to have 60 subjects for her study, but she has to settle for having 30. This will make it harder for her research to survive the scrutiny of the peer-review process, since fewer subjects will make it more likely that an anomoly will skew her statistics.

As far as Feynman himself is concerned, I have no idea if he had autism or asperger syndrome; based on what I know about him, I doubt that he did. He is a hero to me and he is still very much alive in the memories of the people who knew him and loved him. Aside from being brilliant, Feynman was famous for his skepticism and for his honesty. Videos like the one PhilCommander2 made do nothing but dishonor his memory.

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