Lake Forest College News

Consulting scholarly sources, parenting forums, online blogs, and popular media coverage, Kosanke researched the controversy over connection between the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) and autism. Despite a plethora of scientific data denying the causal relationship, parents of autistic children continue to argue that vaccines caused their child’s autism. 

“Many parents of autistic children view ‘parental expertise’, or the notion that their role as parents makes them the foremost experts on their children and their children’s condition as being more trustworthy than scientific evidence and medical research,” explains Kosanke.

“The value our culture places on having ‘gone through an experience’ is tremendous,” said Whidden. “So we get a lot of people willing to discount formally-credentialed experts on a topic in favor of someone who has experienced something.”

According to their research, the anti-vaccine movement puts the entire population at risk. Kosanke researched the concept of herd immunity, the idea that if enough a population is vaccinated, the unvaccinated people are still safe because diseases will not spread. However, the anti-vaccine movement, Kosanke said, “is leading to widespread outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease such as measles, mumps, rubella and pertussis (whooping cough).”

One of the most striking things I’ve found,” said Kosanke, “is that anti-vaccine parents can be proven wrong again and again, but nothing seems to be able to convince them.” 

Kosanke’s research is part of the College’s Richter Scholar Program, which provides high-achieving students the opportunity to take part in academic research with faculty members the summer after their freshmen year. This year, 29 students worked closely with their faculty advisors on various projects ranging from “The Neuropsychology of Acting and Performing” to “Ant Diversity on Green Rooftops.”

“Lake Forest College is a unique place in that it offers undergraduates an opportunity to research alongside a professor,” said Whidden, “something that is usually only possible at the graduate level.”

Kosanke, a Lindenhurst, Illinois, native, is grateful to the College for the opportunity to learn how to conduct independent research. “I really enjoyed the research I did this summer,” she said.

This fall, Kosanke will research Bruno Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother” theory about autism, that autistic children are emotionally detached because their mothers are uncaring.

Kosanke and Whidden’s article will be included in an edited volume titled, Reasoned Argument and Social Change, which is slated to be published in 2012.