From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Ladstone is away.

I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet,

formerly retracted, a 1998 article that suggested a link between the measles, mumps, and rebella vaccine, and autism.

The reasons for the retraction were many, chief among them, serious ethical concerns

surrounding the study's lead doctor, Andrew Wakefield.

According to the UK's General Medical Council, Wakefield performed overly invasive tests on

children, paid the kids to participate,

and failed to disclose ties to a lawyer representing parents of children with autism.

Furthermore, no other study has reproduced Wakefield's research,

and 10 out of his 13 research collaborators have disavowed the article.

So how did bad science make its way into a respected medical journal and into the collective psyche?

The Lancet's editor, Dr. Richard Horton, says it's a mess he's been trying to clean up for a decade.

What we've tried to do over the past 10 years is, first

of all, publish papers that have shown the safety of the vaccine. And secondly, the lesson

we've learned is that anything we publish will be picked up and used. It certainly made us

much more risk-averse, much more conservative. We now try to be

even more cautious about the kinds of work we publish, recognizing that you cannot have a

closed discussion in the scientific community about anything today. Everything is accessible

to everybody at any time.

And those who are paying attention to what you publish do not necessarily approach it with the same level of understanding and report it with the same level of nuance that perhaps you'd

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