A scientist in Denmark has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta for allegedly stealing $1 million in grant money that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had earmarked for autism research.

U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday said they are seeking to extradite Poul Thorsen, 49, accused of wire fraud and money laundering.

He used the stolen money to buy a home in Atlanta, a Harley Davidson motorcycle and two cars, prosecutors said.

"Grant money for disease research is a precious commodity," said Sally Yates, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, in a news release.

"When grant funds are stolen, we lose not only the money, but also the opportunity to better understand and cure debilitating diseases."

Thorsen, a visiting scientist at the Atlanta-based CDC in the 1990s, helped two government agencies in Denmark obtain $11 million in research grants.

He moved back to Denmark in 2002 to be principal investigator for the program. Prosecutors said he was also in charge of administering the research dollars, earmarked in part to study the relationship between autism and exposure to vaccines.

Thorsen submitted false invoices for research expenses and had Aarhus University, where he held a faculty position, transfer the funds to his personal account at the CDC Federal Credit Union in Atlanta, prosecutors said.

Thorsen was an author of the now notorious US CDC funded New England Journal of Medicine Madsen study of 500,000 Danish children which was used worldwide to claim there was no relationship between MMR vaccine and autistic conditions. Thorsen was also involved in publishing studies claiming there was no link between the mercury additive thiomersal in vaccines, autistic conditions and developmental disorders in children.

Numerous irregularities were subsequently revealed in the Madsen study and rates of autistic conditions in fact rose in Denmark contrary to the claims of the authors of the Madsen study: A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism Kreesten Meldgaard Madsen, M.D., Anders Hviid, M.Sc., Mogens Vestergaard, M.D., Diana Schendel, Ph.D., Jan Wohlfahrt, M.Sc., Poul Thorsen, M.D., Jørn Olsen, M.D., and Mads Melbye, M.D. N Engl J Med 2002; 347:1477-1482 November 7, 2002.

According to US vaccine safety organisation Safeminds some of the research Thorsen engaged in substantial numbers of diagnosed autism cases disappeared annually from the data Thorsen and colleagues relied on. Thorsen engaged in email correspondence with the US Centers for Disease Control about how to produce results which were showed a more favourable safety profile for vaccines. SafeMinds is calling for an independent federal investigation of these studies for data manipulation and scientific misconduct.

From August to October of 2003, three articles on the autism-mercury controversy were published in close succession, all of which used data from a Danish registry for psychiatric research to assess the relationship between autism trends and the use of thimerosal. SafeMinds accessed the registry at the time and reported that a large percentage of diagnosed autism cases are lost from the Danish registry each year and that most of those lost cases were older children. Since the studies were based on finding fewer older thimerosal-exposed children than younger unexposed children, the validity of their conclusion exonerating thimerosal in autism was questionable and likely a result of missing records rather than true lower incidence rates among the exposed group.

In addition, internal emails obtained via FOIA document discussion between the Danish researchers and Thornsen which acknowledge that the studies did not include the latest data from 2001 where the incidence and prevalence of autism was declining which would be supportive of a vaccine connection.

The emails also include requests from Thornsen to CDC asking that the agency write letters to the journal Pediatrics encouraging them to publish the research after it had been rejected by other journals.

A top CDC official complied with the request sending a letter to the editor of the journal supporting the publication of the study which they called a “strong piece of evidence that thimerosal is not linked to autism.”

Further background information on these studies, the charges against Dr. Thorsen, and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that support SafeMinds’ concerns are available on their website, www.safeminds.org.