Somers’s book identifies Wiley as an “anthropologist focusing on evolutionary biology and environmental endocrinology in molecular medicine and genetics.” Wiley claims to be a hormone expert, despite academic credentials she has said are limited to a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Webster University. In fact, the university’s records show that Wiley never earned a college degree. When questioned, Wiley said, “I thought I got a degree or a diploma, but it’s possible I was an hour or two short.” Asked for a copy, she said, “I live in a 23-room house with 13 people. I don’t know how long it would take to find it. Could you just say that I don’t have a degree and leave it at that?”
On her Web site, Wiley claims membership in two “professional” organizations: the American Association of Anthropologists (actually the American Anthropological Association) and the New York Academy of Sciences. Both groups say they require no academic credentials. Wiley’s Web bio also states she was a “keynote speaker” for the Inter-national Hormone Society. A spokesman for the Endocrine Society, the premier association for those specializing in hormones, said it had “never heard of this group.” The IHS’s Web site confirmed that Wiley was a speaker at its 2005 convention, appearing on the program with a psychiatrist who lectured that hormones could be renamed after Greek gods and goddesses: testosterone could become “Hercules.”
Wiley says she’s being attacked by doctors who “don’t really care if women get better,” and because her ideas aren’t mainstream. “There’s always been someone who doesn’t fit in. A hundred years ago, it was a patent clerk who came up with a breakthrough on rel-ativity, and he didn’t have credentials either.” (Albert Einstein had a doctorate.) A leading endocrinologist, Dr. Nanette Santoro of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, says this kind of controversy “is what can happen when a celebrity who has no scientific background touts the benefits of concepts promoted by a would-be doctor who has no scientific background.”
In response to criticism of Somers’s book, last week the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates passed a resolution calling on the FDA to increase its oversight and regulation of bioidentical hormones. Wiley’s Web site now notes that her degree is “pending.”
