and steve jobs said who is seth mnookin? if you say something that is outrageous or outlandish even if that is the type of coverage you can bet a lot in science and medicine and politics. my favorite of that would be on the one hand the lakers claim they won the series. [talking over each other] >> to come around to jenny mccarthy is one way in which the public and medical establishment has failed is taking people like jenny mccarthy and saying how is it the public believes this former playboy playmate and go ahead and doctors them. the people who are watching oprah or listening to what jenny mccarthy said we're not talking about 15-year-old boys, looking for old issues of playboy. we are talking about parents who relate to another parent talking about their experiences. and their experience with their children. this is a little bit distinct. we get to the same an end point we do with climate change and others things. the way you get there is different. >> it is probably harder in what you cover remain stream reporters in pu

i am going to speak for ten minutes after which seth mnookin will speak for ten minute and then we will have a dialogue with each other before opening it up to the audience. many of you have probably not heard an apologist speak about autism and that is not surprising since most of the are in the field of counseling, psychology, speech therapy and so on but i have a daughter with autism and she was diagnosed in 1994. at that time there was an emerging feeling there was an epidemic of autism. there was an emerging sense in the united states and other countries that there was a dramatic rise and people said i feel it in my gut that there are more kids with autism now than ever before. one of the strategies anthropologist's often use to look at their own world is to go away. go to other countries and learn about those other countries. not just in and of themselves but to come back and see your own society in a new light and to try to figure out what was happening with my daughter and what was happening with autism epidemiological. was there an epidemic? i started traveling to different cou

having given you my introduction i will now pass it off to seth mnookin and after is done we are going to talk a little bit with each other and ask each other a few questions and have a dialogue about these issues and open it up to the floor for much of the time so you can have any questions or comments you would like to offer. i do want to say if there are questions from the audience please wait until the boom like gets close to you so that the question can be heard by the buick -- viewing audience. >> thank you so much. thank you all for coming on a saturday. it had been a rainy saturday but now looks like an increasingly lovely saturday. and thanks a lot to the book festival for having us. i am going to talk briefly about how i came to write my book and then a little bit about what it is about. and and when we open it up to you all, we will both discover that what we might have been your questions, almost every appearance i have done what i anticipated the audience to be interested in and what they have been interested in have been different. i began work on "the panic virus" in 200