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Could Assortative Mating Explain Autism?
clm1970 writes "Researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has put forth the theory that 'how we mate and marry' could explain the increase in rates of Autism Spectrum Disorders, particularly Asperger's. When two technically minded people marry and have children, so the provocative theory goes, they are more apt to produce a child who crosses the line into mild autism."
isn't one of the major tenets of geekdom the inability to attract the opposite sex?
Sacha Baron Cohen (yes, the comedian) does "prolific work".
The theory of "assortative mating" was first put forth by neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism researcher and something of a rock star in the field. He's the first cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, and like his cousin, his prolific work tends toward the out-of-the-box. Combine that with his outspokenness — uncommon for a scientist — and it's clear why at a recent international conference in San Diego, he was "frequently mobbed by fellow attendees and treated with near universal adulation," Warner writes.
I don't have proof but this guy looks and sounds like he's just putting for a controversial theory to be controversial and get his name in the papers. I wouldn't give much credit here.
So we should cause cheerleaders to date nerds, and football players fangirls? Maybe no one who can name all eleven doctors should be allowed to marry at all, but rather should be put full time to impregnating Olympic athletes?
I like the idea that Aspergers is associated directly with intelligence. I also like the whorish way that the paper's author plays with the concept of eugenics to get more hits.
I also like the way that the author tries to ignore environmental conditions such as increased urbanization and subsequent hyper-socialization.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
the rise in numbers is more a function of over diagnosis. Like ADHD before it.
This idea came up between me and a friend when reflecting on the personality types in our highly-geek work environment: oh my what happens to those of us who have kids together. On reflection, many of our peers have smart/geeky parents.
I'd venture that a majority of my co-workers could fit this borderline criteria.
my adopted son has aspergers (mild autism) and his biological father is definitely NOT technically minded. My wife (who I would say is technically minded) and I had a child together. While shes a complete sarcastic smartass like us, theres no indication of autism.
I read the article, but could not find anything. Is it just his speculation? It sounds, and I use this word lightly, plausible as a thought experiment. Question is, is it just that?
I am diagnosed with AS and I am always interested in science behind it.
Thanks, Mom and Dad.
load "linux",8,1
Does TFA add anything new?
This has been suspected for a long time. The theory is that the geek density in Silicon Valley enabled many marriages between people who would otherwise have had trouble finding a date.
Or so the article states. But, having read the article, the "results" are actually more speculation than anything else (and one line in the article says as much). He hasn't really studied it, he just thinks he's seen some evidence and decided to say so.
Now to pull some criticism out of my nether regions (gotta match the story for scientific rigor)... based on my observations, this seems like groundless speculation. Looking at all the couples I know socially, none of them are in the same field. Broadening the search to people of whom I'm aware... maybe a total of two couples are in the same/similar fields; so I have a hard time believing this hypothesis will turn out to have any significant basis in fact.
#DeleteChrome
we all know autism/aspegers is caused by vaccines....
Increasing rates in Autism are due to the ever expanding classification system of the DSM. Behaviour that was previously not included in the 'diagnosis' (qualifications, if you prefer) are now included.
You could read Jon Ronson's Psychopath Test for a small insight into the way the people behind the categorisation process simply make shit up and grow the criteria for inclusion to a category like they're pulling rabbits out of a hat stuffed with millions of rabbits.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Quote from article: "The theory is still largely speculation, shored up by seductive anecdotes about Asperger's appearing unusually commonly in MIT alums and their children..."
Let us know when you have more than speculation and we will be quite interested.
By the way, I was diagnosed with Asperger's so this isn't a troll post. Theory becoming something that gets peoples' minds moving in a direction that can cause false categorization of ideas is normal but not newsworthy.
Actually, yeah, it is. Fear, panic, and fascination keep the money flowin' :)
Here is an article almost a /decade/ old on this:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers.html
if you have ENOUGH geeks just sitting around, something's BOUND to happen. Even by accident.
Probability, man.
Look at the pet choice to determine the likelihood of a family having an autistic child. If the family has cats, (or just fish or reptiles), they're more likely to have children with autism than a family who has several social dogs.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
As the parent of an autistic child, and professional computer geek, who has socialized in both groups, thi s has always seemed pretty obvious. Aspergers has, in some circles, been nicknamed "the geek disease". It has been known (no citation, sorry) that autism spectrum disorders correlate highly with the intelligence of both parents. However, there are different kinds of intelligence, and this article poses a plausible theory about just what characteristics are relevant
Everyone has a mate-choosing algorithm.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
An interesting question is whether people capable of intense mental focus (which may be medicalized into an Asperger's diagnosis)
are better at programming and thus go into it or related fields, and are thus found in higher percentages among geeks, or...
Does programming train (and eventually re-pattern the connections of) the brain into being more deeply attention-focussed, thus
causing Asperger's syndrome.
There is no doubt that patterns of mental work re-shape the brain's connections and tendencies
(e.g. Prolonged excessive multi-tasking eventually causes lack of ability to focus)
so if the programming comes first and Aspergers second, we might expect NOT to see an inheritance of the tendency,
unless it is an epigenetic effect.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
They're also just the kind of obsessive types who will become convinced that their kid has autism the second he/she acts a little shy....and the kind of people who will take him/her to the pediatrician and pepper the good doctor with their "autism" observations until he finally relents and labels the kid an autistic tard and dopes him up on whatever-the-fuck autism drug happens to be hot today....and the kind of people who will then tell everyone who will listen all the details of the "autistic" kid and his/her treatments, in elaborate and excruciating fucking detail, whether they want to hear it or not.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Under the Americans With DIsabilities Act, Asperger's Syndrome is a get-out-of-stupid-corporate-team-building-activity-free card.
Now just try to claim, without giggling, that you're not tempted to go out and get diagnosed.
I thought it was long established that autism has strong genetics factors, and that mild forms of autism are more strongly represented in technical fields than non-technical fields. Why is it shocking that when two people marry who are both from a population with a strong predisposition towards autism, their child has a higher chance to get autism as well?
Either there's something in the paper I'm missing, or the submitter got trolled by the language used in the paper.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
First, obligatory snarky "This is news?!?"
Second, this has always frightened me. See, I'm weird. I don't make good eye contact unless I do it deliberately. I'm easily overwhelmed by loud noises. If I was confused as a child, I'd have a breakdown. Friends were REALLY hard for me to make, I just didn't understand social interactions until late in Middle School, and even then I was mimicing instead of understanding how folks interacted, but most kids tolerated me at that point, so I was relatively happy. It wasn't until college that I *REALLY* started to understand how to interact with people, and that my brand of extremly honest answers wasn't what most folks expected. ("Hey! How you doin?" "Oh, well, I've kinda been really bummed out lately, SoAndSo is givin' me a real hard time, and my mom is just driving me insane, she thinks I've been having sex with this girl, but I swear we're just friends, hell she has a boyfriend!" "...Ok, well, that kind of sucks, take care.")
I've fallen madly in love with and married a weird woman. Growing up, she didn't realize that other kids thought she was mean until nearly middle school. She has mild but real OCD. She can't handle surprises.
Neither of us has a diagnosis of autism/asperger's, though we wince when we think about it. Hell, given the criteria nowadays, I probabaly WOULD have gotten the lable as a child, but self diagnosis of Asperger's being a internet hobby, I think I'll avoid too much speculation.
We have more or less accepted that we're going to have a high risk of some sort of Autistic Spectrum striking, but that's ok. We'll be watching. An autistic 2 year old was an autistic 18 month old, was an autistic 1 year old, and was almost certainly an autistic 6-9 month old. We WILL intervene. We will get the proper therapies, we will NOT let our child fall further and further behind if we can do a gorram thing about it. Play therapy, behavioral interventions. Close follow up with our pediatician. As good a diet as our likely picky child can be taught to eat. Every fracking vaccination we can use to protect him. Every bit of love we can give her.
And if our child is normal, well we'll do the same damn thing, just with less therapy. :-)
Autism *is* geneticly linked, and autism *does* respond to proper therapy. (And any parent who gets their child involved with chelation therapy should be prosecuted for neglect at the least and abuse if possible. If your child doesn't have lead poisoning, then "heavy metals" aren't causing your childs autism. You did. It's not your fault, but it's your genes.)
Heh, capcha: "persuade"
I loved that guy in Borat!
1. Autism is genetic. Not new.
2. If both parents carry the genotype, the phenotype is more likely to emerge. Not new.
3. When you isolate communities, inbreeding amplifies genetic problems. This happened in segregated Jewish communities, isolated mountain communities, and most ironicly to a community of White supremacists who established a community in South America in the 20th century.
You know I always did find jocks (and military guys) physically attractive, maybe I'm doing it wrong going after those cute awkward dorky guys...
I should be thinking of the children I'm unable to produce with another guy!
They are missing an essential component for procreation.... Which would be a woman.
And I'm someone who knows, not that I would *want* to have a kid (I would never torture another human to have my face)...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
How long did it take them to come up with this theory...
Anyway. Just one more reason to find a not too bright 24 years old with long blonde hair and big boobs...
Privacy is terrorism.
Of course /. is going to say 'it's not scientifically proven!' but plenty of things make absolute sense. I am an aspie, not self-diagnosed... hit every single one of the diagnosis criteria hard, and I couldn't be more proud of being HFA (Highly Functioning Autistic). So many people look at Aspergers or Autism as a very negative thing because it is different. There are NT (Neurotypical) and ND (Neurodiverse) people that do just fine functioning in society, or with each other in relationships. There also are those (you can call them Simon Baron-Cohen hits the nail on the head with Empathizing/Systemizing Theory of Mind, and this Assortative Mating is only the next logical step in explaining how Autism progresses from generation to generation. The science already proves that there are genetic precursors to Autism spectrum disorders, so it isn't really a stretch at all to say the parents aren't subconsciously on the spectrum and attracted to someone else who is.
I am only really into girls on the spectrum who are hyper intelligent and 'nerdy' which in a lot of ways is all being an aspie is, socially awkward and overly intelligent. Believe it or not, most of /. userbase is somewhere on the spectrum, and many of the people who you associate with are as well. In my personal opinion, a good 70% of those I associate with and 10% of people I encounter display the traits, and the law of attraction be it romantic or otherwise means that like mixes with like. Almost all of my friends are aspies whether they know/admit/care or not, and of course people will just scream 'overdiagnosis' because statistically diagnoses have jumped. That is because we are only finally starting to scratch the surface of these 'disorders' and starting to realize that comorbid/cooccurring disorders correlate to causes. Psychology as a whole has only been around about a hundred years, so it is no surprise the field is rapidly developing quicker than the research can keep up.
It's in the vaccines.
At least not in the last 30 years when the autistic rates have been increasing.
Changes in the DSM and mainstreaming autistic kids is new in that time frame.
it's 'on the rise' because it is recognized and diagnosed more accurately.
"The theory is still largely speculation, shored up by seductive anecdotes about Asperger's appearing unusually commonly in MIT alums and their children,"
So..not a theory at all. Simply a musing, one that's trying to solve a problem that doesn't actual exist. The problem being 'why it's on the rise', not that Asperger isn't real.
And so is Assburgers. That's a nod to cracked.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am a scientist and pro psychologist After reading this story about the parents I've came to the conclusion that when 2 socially awkward people make babies, they make super socially awkward babies. Not trying to be funny but those 2 people were hardcore nerds and the wife has the most frizzy hair and awkard glasses and face gestures. It's common sense that they would create a kid with double the problems they had. It's basic science.
Two geeks living together, lets say in Silicon Valley, are likely to be making high 5/low 6 figure salaries, and can afford to send their children to all sorts of doctors and therapists. What about the rates of autism in families in, oh, lets say east San Jose or East Palo Alto? I'm sure there are plenty of families without health insurance, whose parents aren't Google engineers, whose children may fall through the diagnostic cracks.
I am very glad for you - your kid will hopefully know s/he is loved, no matter what. I'm glad there are people who can do that. I took the opposite approach and on top of never being all that interested in kids, have always felt that there was no way I was subjecting some poor unsuspecting kid to my alternating neglect and intense focus nevermind the weird social issues. My cats seem messed up enough, honestly, a kid wouldn't stand a chance. Good luck and best wishes!
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
Good thing my wife can't figure out which end of a cell phone to talk into. Daughter (now a teen) is social and a geek. I guess I got lucky.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The world is round here, no corners.
Could drinking water contaminated with every imaginable chemical, exposure to heavy metals, mothers poisoning themselves with all kinds of harsh chemicals found in home cleaning products, hairspray , deodorant and makeup be responsible for autism?
Hmmm, tough choice.
As someone with mild Asperger's, I call bollox on this.
While it seems self-evident that like-minded people would breed, concentrating certain traits, and some of those traits may lead to ASD-like symptoms, I think the whole matter is overblown.
For one thing, it's already well established that the increase in diagnosis is due to greater awareness of the condition and a broadening of the definition. If we applied today's ASD standards to people in the 19th century, you would get nearly the same rate of ASD found in the population.
Any differences would be attributed to things like diet (our current diet absolutely sucks and leads to artificial ADD-like symptoms) and socialization. Before fast food, people had to work harder to eat, and they often had to grow it themselves. The nutritonal content was greater. Secondly, we live in an internet and TV culture that isolates people and doesn't force them to interact socially. It is likely that potential for autism among the Amish is no less than in the rest of the population, yet their family-focused culture will present better social training to their children.
My wife and I both display ASD traits, mine worse than hers. We were worried that our daughter would inherit this. However, she's displaying no signs of it. That could be a fluke. OR it could be the fact that we feed her an organic diet (to the maximum extent possible with a picky toddler). I'm not even sure we're doing such a great job with the social interaction, because there's more TV (actually Netflix) going on than we think is best, but nevertheless her social attentiveness seems superior to her training. We're trying to teach her well, but she interacts well socially in ways that we did not train her to. (Oh, and I think Netflix isn't as bad as regular TV, because TV is interrupted by commercials. Therefore Netflix requires and encourages a better attention span.) She's also spending a lot of time with her socially-skilled grandparents (my wife's parents, as opposed to mine who are socially unskilled). Also, I think the fact that we are concerned about ASD affects how we interact with her ourselves. And finally, just to be really freaky, we started vaccinations late. It's stupid to avoid them entirely, but it does no harm to have them a little later for a child that is not in daycare. (Although there have been a handful of bizarre cases, where a child was given too many different vaccines at one time, I don't think that vaccines are generally implicated in ASD. Just space them out so that the immune system will not be overwhelmed.)
there's a much better explanation, based on someone who quotes cured quotes her son of autism. she hypothesised that autism was caused by excessive toxins reaching the brain.
she hypothesised and then proved through simply looking up existing medical research that the toxins get there because of strong antibiotics and the practice of immunisation killing "good" bacteria as well as bad, leaving a body that is completely devoid of bacteria that then re-grows, and re-forms "pockets" of bad bacteria that are both stronger and harder for the body to get rid of.
there are a few other things that she hypothesised and then empirically proved as well, but they boil down to a combination of factors of "accepted western medical science" doing untold damage through sheer arrogance. of course, you are entirely free to completely ignore the above, because this is slashdot, it's the internet, and there's so much crap about i'm sure that there are many more people who will want to believe what they want to hear, instead of "whoops, we brought this on ourselves by trusting the accepted medical science of today"...
Yeah, just like how greasy food has been "proven" to have no relation to acne. I know that if I eat fast food, chocolate, and/or ice-cream, I will be breaking out. This is an experiment that I've repeated on many occasions.... You know, when the tobacco companies tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer, we know better than to believe them. Getting back to autism, I have no problem believing that the enormous stress of having multiple (4 or more) vaccines at one time is enough to throw a monkey wrench into the works. In years past, they said that stress causes ulcers. Then they changed it to say that bugs cause them. But the current research shows most people have these bugs, but only in the stressed out people do they cause pathology.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of geeks bearing geeks?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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What increases autism rates is an increase in the diagnosis of autism.
I don't know if people have realized this, but nobody is an asshole anymore. Now people are 'borderline personality disorder' or 'aspergers' or 'bipolar' -- but people haven't changed, just diagnosis.
Personally, I still think some people are still just assholes. Not that I don't ascribe to mental illness -- I most certainly do believe people can have those aforementioned conditions -- but I think problems are over-diagnosed and over-medicated.
I dunno if assortative mating explains autism, but I'm pretty sure autism explains this story.
A simple regression should settle whether this theory has legs: We all know that autism diagnoses are exploding. If this is the driving force of the explosion, then families who are nowhere near technical fields should see their autism rates stay at the historical average. Is that happening? This is the first and obvious question. If it is not happening, if autism rates are going up among all demographics, then the "more interbreeding geeks" explanation is just clearly wrong.
And they're changing the new DSM so that there's no longer such thing as an autism diagnosis when a person is intellectually disabled.
It seems like every "geek" I know claims to suffer from Asperger's, like it's some badge of merit and honour.
Much better than being just another geek, I suppose.
I've always believed that it's just mercury/other heavy metal poisoning. I'd think people that work around computers/electronics/technology in general probably are exposed to mercury far more often, even if that and other elements have stopped being used widely in manufacturing.
The worrying thing to me is the expansion of technological waste, this'll expose the greater population to more mercury and other elements, making the health risks higher.
But yeah I'm sure genetics plays a large role in it either way... These "disorders" etc could just be varying degrees of the Human psychology, I wasn't too old when I realized people on a whole are very similiar in that sense, and I think if two people are at one end of the spectrum then with genetics it's likely that those traits will be made more apparent.
I guess, then, that Jenny McCarthy would be considered an outlier in the data set that produced these conclusions?
Nope... it's his cousin. Small world huh?
I was considering applying for a job assisting Autistic persons a few weeks ago and had a similar thought to this one while I was mentally preparing for a possible interview. Once we started putting marks down as a species it seems obvious to me that those who had a proficiency in numbers would be selected to reproduce. I myself am bipolar with a little OCD in there too (Thanks Mom and Dad, respectively) and I've read similar things explaining its prevalence. These spectrum extremes exist because they are of value to society and the difficulties that come from these extremes are usually born by the individual, for the most part, or at least the benefits outweigh the negative societal impacts.
Frontline did stories about medicating children for mental illness:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/
Tagline: In recent years, there's been a 4000% increase in the diagnosis in children of bipolar, a mental illness. Jacob is one of those children.
Parents hesitence at using live saving vaccines:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/view/
In some American communities like this one, parents are hesitating to vaccinate their children, despite their doctor's advice.
And what happens when someone who is seriously mentally ill is left on their own:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/released/view/
Five years ago, we told the story of the severely mentally ill in our jails, prisons. Today, nearly all have since been released - and re-arrested.
These should get everyone up to speed. View these and do some research before commenting, unless your doing a joke comment, then by all means!
Parents of autistic kids are among the most vocal of the anti-vaccine crowd. Is that now considered to be a "technically minded" attitude?
For all of you condeming the parents
Parents of autistic kids are conned by vultures preying on the desperate need for an answer or cure for their child, this is where all the bullshit cures start and gain popularity, not all parents are nerdy or autistic, and deciding what is true or not is very hard, especially when celebrities are telling them shit on TV.
Because autism can vary wildy, some children are very disabled by it (no vocal interaction age 10+, extremely unco-ordinated, random violent outbursts,etc), parents are driven to try to find ANYTHING that can help or reduce these problems, Want to see this in action try volenteering to help at an autism charity playgroup instead of talking bullshit on the internet.
I consider myself very lucky that my own son is mildly autistic (social,speech (getting better with help),OCD tendency,light sensitivity,audio sensitivity), I would be very desperate too if he had the problems some of the other children I see at the groups have.
I try to explain why the Bullshit is Bullshit to other parents with mixed results and I feel bad about doing it, as it seems to rob them of the small hope of change, as you can see how desperate they are to have even a little bit of normal interaction with their children.
A lot of you seem to have no compassion, and almost certainly have only seen mildly autistic examples.
Only an AC beat me to making a Sasha Baron Cohen reference. Just one reference! You guys are slipping.
For shame.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Asperger's syndrome: ADHD of the new millennium.
IMHO 99% of the people with mild autism/asperger's are just people who lack social skills because they futz with their computer too much to develop them.
what does that make me?
I read an article in a science mag (in a waiting room) that spoke of a reduction of neural connectivity between different areas of the brain discovered in those with Autism and Aspergers. I speculated that this probably correlates nicely with the tendency for males to far outnumber females affected by each of these. Given the much larger corpus callosum (20-40%, averaging maybe 24%) of the female brain, I proposed that this larger "cable" between the the two halves of the brain would likely be supported by a more robust network of nerves throughout the brain. This would be required to supply the data this additional "bandwidth" would indicate flows between the halves of the female brain. In females this reduction in inter-area connectivity would obviously not be first indicated by signs of Autism or Aspergers, but in mental and behavioral patterns that would tend to appear more male. Girls and women who find boys and men more suitable friends that other females, that show markedly reduced interest in activities females of their age are attracted to (dolls, fashion, shopping, etc.), and who may tend to be more technical, analytical, mathematical, etc. may indeed be on-the-spectrum, as they say. Since smart women of all kinds have been with us from the beginning, I would agree that the change in society most responsible for the increase in Autism/Aspergers must be the acceptance and growth in the number of women in technical fields formerly dominated by men. This relative concentration of technically-minded women has caused the greatest increase in the interaction and coupling of of those who before would have either had spouses who had no idea what their mates did-but had dinner on the table at six and constantly fussed about the interior decor, or lived lives of quiet desperation playing bridge and working the Times crossword puzzle in their heads, so as not to disturb their acceptable but plodding husbands-or bosses. As I have often told my former Managing-Editor wife, some women manage five newspapers, some can look at the contents of your kitchen and list all the meals you can make in order of difficulty, prep time, or how the presented meal will look with your dining room decor. Unfortunately, few can do both. (We have a son on the spectrum. He is the most intelligent person I know.)
You can’t comprehend fact that Cube4
simultaneous 24 hour days rotate within
same 24 hour rotation of Mother Earth.
Seriously, after all the discussions on the theory of evolution, you'd think people would know the difference between a hypothesis and a theory.
I believe this and I'll tell you why. My wife and I are both prone to geekish behavior. I've resorted to calling myself a nerd, because I have a HAM license, I do electrical engineering for ha ha's, and I'm a Unix Admin by trade. Both sides of our our families have engineers, and otherwise brilliant and nerdy types of folks.
One of my daughters has been diagnosed on the Autisim Spectrum as PDD-NOS. Very smart kid, but she's obviously autistic. I see some traits in my other daughters too, but they are considered "normal" (whatever that is right?). All of our four girls have been raise in the same manner. We're very health conscience and do all the oraganic/natural things possible. Nature vs. Nurture if you ask me??? I say both, but with a stronger bias towards Nature. There a quite a few things that our out of parents control and it seems like there are weird chemicals in everything these days.
"Disconnected Kids" presents a very fresh new take on Autism, Asperger's, ADHD, etc., coming up with a "one size fits all" theory, and quickly developing a track record of successfully treating (i.e. eliminating) it. Recommended read.
I come here for the love
as far as i can see, everybody shows at least one 'trait' of at least one kind of disorder so mating could lead to the extinction of the human race as we know it, which is imo not a bad idea, except the bit that all this mating leads to more humans than matter available on earth in the end, its a nice gedanken experiment really
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
That the higher rate of aspergers and autism diagnosis could be due to the ever broadening classification for the disorder, as well as pharmaceutical influence?
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.