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From: Paul Goldstein
Date: 22 Oct 2011
Time: 10:09:29 -0500
Remote Name: 88.88.238.25
Hi, Dr. Drayna. We met a few times in the 1990's during your appearances at the reunions of the Hollins Communications Research Institute, and I filled out and mailed back a few of your questionnaires. I have an interesting question for you: It is commonplace in articles in speech-language pathology journals for authors to include statements such as "It is believed that stuttering in at least some individuals has a neurogenetic basis", or "There exists a growing body of research evidence to suggest that predisposition to stuttering has a genetic origin." [These are not exact quotes, but typify the types of statements commonly found in the literature.] In other words, there is nearly always some qualification, such as "believed to be" or "evidence suggests that... ". In your opinion, do you think that we have reached the point of scientific knowledge in this area where we can definitively state that a neurogenetic basis to a predisposition to stutter has now been PROVEN (at least for some who stutter) - and therefore, qualifiers such as "believed to be" or "evidences suggests that" should now confidently be dropped from professional speech-language pathology articles? Or would you say there is still reason to be cautious about making such a statement?