The Brain Eating Vaccine Conspiracy

This blog post makes me sad. It's about a story I wrote and how it was horribly twisted into a dangerous nugget of right-wing paranoia. Last week, my profile of Robert Sapolsky was posted online. While most of the story is about the dangerous effects of chronic stress, the last several hundred words explore a new research project being undertaken by Sapolsky and others, which is often referred to as a "stress vaccine":

After several years of genetic engineering — it’s not easy to substitute all the dangerous genes with their therapeutic replacements — Sapolsky began introducing the modified herpes virus into rodent brains. Then he induced a series of tragedies, such as a massive stroke or an extended seizure, which would trigger the release of glucocorticoids. (Chronic stress is like a slow-motion stroke.) Within minutes, the modified herpes virus began pumping out neuroprotective proteins, which limited the extent of cell death. As a result, the damage was contained. For instance, rats given the herpes treatment were able to stave off practically all cell loss, while control rats lost nearly 40 percent of neurons in a given region. In the hippocampus, neuronal death was reduced substantially. “To be honest, I’m still amazed that it works,” he says. “It’s not going to help anybody soon” — the research is still years away from clinical trials — “but we’ve proved that it’s possible. We can reduce the neural damage caused by stress.”

Now for the bad news. Apparently, one of the most popular Google Trend searches for August 3 was "brain eating vaccine". The Juggle.com blog reconstructs the timeline:

...When the Wired article becomes available, it's quickly picked up by London's Daily Mail where it's aggressively paraphrased and a little sensationalized from 6800 words down to less than 400. These 400 words in the Daily Mail imply that Sapolsky is working to create a vaccine that will eliminate feelings of stress. Based on the Daily Mail article, the kind of people who are worried that world governments are conspiring to sterilize and/or pacify their populations through drugs in their water supplies conclude that Sapolsky is working to rid us of our emotions via his vaccine project. Since this theoretical vaccine would work by altering brain chemistry, the excitable folks decide that it's going to destroy people's brains and thus encourage folks to search for "brain eating vaccines".

And so a decade of careful experimental research is reduced to a delusional rant about how the "elite" are moving to "lobotomize, zombify global population". I don't want to post the actual – video of Alex Jones, but if you want to see what happens when the paranoid style in American politics fuses with YouTube and molecular biology - the video is a greatest hits of idiotic conspiracy theories, from the government putting lithium in the water to drug addiction vaccines that destroy brain tissue - you should check it out. The saddest part is that this diatribe has already been seen by tens of thousands of people. Paranoia sells.

If you happened to find this article by searching Google for a "brain eating vaccine," please know that there is no such thing. Instead, what the article discusses are possible treatments that, if we're lucky, will one day be used to help prevent brain damage in stroke victims. Alex Jones is a liar.