William Shaw (autism researcher)


William Shaw is an American chemist, autism researcher and the founder of the Great Plains Laboratory, based in Lenexa, Kansas.

Education

Shaw has a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Georgia and a PhD from the Medical University of South Carolina, also in biochemistry.

Career

After obtaining his PhD, Shaw spent six years working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he was a supervisory research chemist and the chief of the radioimmunoassay laboratory. He then worked at Mercer University in Atlanta for a year as an assistant professor of pharmacy, before beginning a twelve-year stint at Smith Kline Beecham Clinical Laboratories, also in Atlanta. From 1991 until 1996, he worked at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. His laboratory, the Great Plains Laboratory, which he founded in 1996, specializes in metabolic and nutritional testing, particularly as it pertains to autism. The Great Plains Laboratory is fully certified under the federally mandated
Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments.

Autism

He began studying autism in 1993, and has contended that acetaminophen may be a major cause of autism, a hypothesis which he advanced in a paper published in 2013 in the Journal of Restorative Medicine. Shaw has also contended that yeast infections may also cause autism, and has also endorsed chelation therapy as an autism treatment. Another topic Shaw has researched has been the excretion of certain metabolites of clostridia bacteria, such as 3--3-hydroxypropionic acid. This research has concluded that autistic children excrete higher levels of this compound, and that antibiotics may therefore be useful as an autism treatment. He is the author of "Biological Treatments for Autism and PDD," and gave a speech to the organization Parents Helping Parents in Santa Clara, California in 2008.