How breathtakingly insulting to the 100,000s of parents and caregivers of autistic children over the past 30 years, who have sacrificed 1,000s of hours, $MM of lost revenue, their own health, their own goals, and even attention that could have been paid to their other children and their community, exerting heroic efforts and sparing no expense to reach into a single child's mind to teach him or her basic skills and share some kind of human connection, starting from zero with no answers, no training, and sometimes not even family or a support network.
Unlike these scientists, most of these parents and caregivers will not be thanked or applauded for their work by society, but they only did it because it happened to be their child.
Let's not acknowledge that that their efforts correspond to a real event-- instead, let's dismiss all of the potential links uncovered and directions for future research, and wave it all away, feeling self-assured that we are being skeptical and rigorous while eating up taxpayer money from these same parents who still have no answers.