This is not so; we rely on authorities because we can't judge everything ourselves. If you show me some new evidence on the role of free protons in the aging process or whatever, it's not a mistake for me to say "I'll ignore that until such time as <someone I trust> addresses it". I might be wrong as to reality, but I can't avoid using that exact strategy in almost all of my life.
But that's not an appeal to authority, really, is it? That's your relying on an authority to inform yourself, rather than pointing to authority as why others should believe what you do. These strike me as subtly different, though there's clearly some overlap in considerations...
There's a difference between using authority status as a filter to find likely-to-be-valid arguments and using "so-and-so says X is not true" alone as a rebuttal to evidence that X is true. The former is a pragmatic research tool, the latter is the fallacy of appeal to authority.
