Autism Vox

Mercury In Court

by Kristina Chew, PhD on June 8th, 2007

After a number of posts linking the mercury-based preservative thimerasol and also mercury from the environment to autism and to the rising prevalence rate of autism, to an “epidemic of autism,” and with regular reference to “rivers of diarrhea” as what happens to children injected with the above-mentioned substances, journalist David Kirby’s pre-trial account of the upcoming “vaccine court” hearings is written in a more straightforward style, with an emphasis on presenting the “evidence” and without the same amount of rhetoric.

Kirby explains the Autism Omnibus Proceeding; in describing the evidence of the government vs. the lawyers for the 4800 families who are plaintiffs, he distinguishes between “epidemiological” evidence and evidence from “‘biological’ science.” The “epidemiological” evidence of the government includes, according to Kirby, a CDC study that found no link between thimerasol and autism, as well as research from Sweden, Denmark and the UK. The “biological” evidence that the “family lawyers” will use includes “data from animal models, test tube studies, and examinations of children with autism”; the lawyers, Kirby notes, will “try to present a plausible biological mechanism by which mercury (and to a lesser extent, MMR) could cause autistic-like symptoms — at the molecular, cellular, and clinical level.” Data from family videos “before and after their own regression” and also after (as Kirby writes) “experimental” treatments such as chelation will be provided. Kirby briefly mentions some biological evidence (including a study “showing no difference in the mercury levels of blood and hair of typical vs. autistic kids”) that the government will use; described in more detail is “some epidemiology” that the family lawyers may refer to, including data on rates in California (which, according to Kirby, “keeps the most reliable autism statistics,” without noting what the criterion for “reliability” in autism statistic-keeping might be).

In the final paragraphs of his piece, Kirby veers away from the subject matter of the hearings—-as he puts it, “the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines and/or the live-virus measles-mumps-rubella shot caused autism or autism-like symptoms in some American children.” After noting that, “if we can show how thimerosal caused ‘autism’” (Kirby does not provide an explanation for his use of quotation marks around the word “autism”), he greatly, and quickly, expands the list of potential environmental agents that might cause autism:

pesticides, PCBs, flame retardants, jet fuel, environmental mercury in air, water and fish, or any combination thereof.

Jet fuel as a potential cause of autism? It is true, one cannot know and, me not being a scientist, I am not the person to make the argument, either against or for. Being a literary critic and a classics professor, I would like to point out a few more stylistic and rhetorical features of Kirby’s piece; it is well to remember, that rhetoric can be defined as the artful use of words and language to persuade.

Kirby is the author of Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic - A Medical Controversy and the two main words of his title—”evidence” and “harm”—are construed throughout his Huffington Post piece. I have pointed out his noting of the “evidence” to be used by both the plaintiff (the 4800 families) and the defendent (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). In the first sentence of the second paragraph, Kirby uses a term whose meaning I am not quite sure of. The sentence is “Monday will mark the first time ever that evidence of autistic harm from childhood vaccines is examined and cross-examined in a court of law” and the term is “autistic harm”: Does this term mean that there is some particular kind of “harm” that is caused by autism? Or that an autistic person is one who does or performs some particular kind of “harm”? Might it be possible to retitle Kirby’s book as, indeed “Evidence of Autistic Harm”?

The doer of this harm, as Kirby notes, is mercury. The first item of research that Kirby notes as showing a “plausible biological mechanism by which mercury (and to a lesser extent, MMR) could cause autistic-like symptoms” is this:

1) Many children with autism, probably due to genetics, are deficient in certain sulfur-based proteins that defend against heavy metal accumulation in humans. The proteins, which include glutathione, are called “thiols,” and sometimes “mercaptans,” from the Latin mercurium captans, or literally “mercury capturers.”

The notion that autistic children have a “genetic predisposition”—something in their biological and physiological make-up that renders them more likely to be affected by “environmental triggers”—is not unfamiliar. For one of the specific proteins that “defend against heavy metal accumulation in humans” to have the name “mercaptans,” which contains an echo of the word “mercury,” seems quite apposite. Kirby notes that mercaptans is “from the Latin mercurium captans, or literally ‘mercury capturers,’” a translation which nicely dovetails with the notion that these proteins “defend against heavy metal accumulation in humans”—-here are proteins that do nothing less than capture mercury which, according to some, is the very culprit of for children becoming autistic.

“Mercury capturers” is a workable, though not the most accurate, translation of the Latin mercurium captans; a literal translation would be something like “seizing/grasping mercury” (captans is a present active participle from the verb capto, captare). While mercurium here of course refers to a certain “silvery-white poisonous metallic element,” there is another meaning of mercurius (this is the same word despite the different ending—Latin is an inflected language, which means that one changes the endings of words to show their meaning in a sentence). Mercurius is the Latin name for the Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods who wears the winged sandals; his swiftness is emphasized in these lines from Ode II.7.13-14 by the Roman poet Horace.

Sed me per hostis Mercurius celer
denso pauentem sustulit aere

[But through the enemies swift Mercury took me
away, terrified at the dense array of bronze]

Mercury is also the god of commerce and trade, and of thieves; he leads the souls of the dead down to Hades. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes (composed roughly around the 8th century B.C.) provides an account of Mercury (as I will refer to him here) that illustrates some of his main attributes: cunning, trickery, deceit, and a way with words that might be called rhetorical skill. The Hymn describes the birth and the early adventures of the young god: Born to Zeus and the nymph Maia, Mercury sneaks out of his cradle, invents the lyre by killing a turtle and taking its shell, and stealing the cattle of the god Apollo. Indeed, Mercury slaughters, cooks, and feasts on Apollo’s cattle before hopping back into his cradle, where he is found and confronted by a not too happy Apollo. (Apollo picks up Mercury to get the full story; Mercury sneezes and Apollo drops him.) Eventually, Apollo brings Mercury to Zeus (or Jupiter), who, being the king of the gods and the father of both, sits as a judge over the “trial” of Mercury. Apollo is swayed to drop his charges against Mercury when the young god plays his new invention, the lyre, and charms him with its lovely sound:

But Apollo was seized with a longing not to be allayed, and he opened his mouth and spoke winged words to Hermes:

`Slayer of oxen, trickster, busy one, comrade of the feast, this song of yours is worth fifty cows, and I believe that presently we shall settle our quarrel peacefully. Hymn to Hermes

Mercury is the defendant in this trial, Apollo the plaintiff, Zeus the judge and arbiter; Mercury prevails by artfully persuading Apollo who, one could say, is literally bought for a song, the evidence of the harm he has caused noted, but discounted. The young god, well-skilled in rhetoric, knows how to make an argument, whatever the actual validity of his claims.

Whether as the trickster god of classical mythology or the environmental kind from air pollution, Mercury is hard to pin down, not unlike the cause of autism: No wonder he is to have his day in court.

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POSTED IN: Cause, Classics, Environment, Epidemic, Health, Language, Legal Issues, Myth, Poetry, Rhetoric, Science, Vaccines