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February 20 - March 6, 2022
Along the way, they have refashioned pop culture in their own image; now it’s cool to be obsessed with dinosaurs, periodic tables, and Doctor Who—at any age. The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future.
Larry was genial and forthcoming during our interview as he explained how Perl was born as a top secret project at the National Security Agency. His boss asked him to design a software tool for configuring two sets of computers remotely, one on the East Coast and one on the West. But Larry—who once wrote that the three great virtues of programmers are their laziness, impatience, and hubris—was loath to spend a month coding a widget that could be used for only a single task. Instead, he crafted Perl and slipped a tape containing the source code into his pocket before walking out the door.
learning the story of how this baffling condition was first discovered in 1943 by a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner, who noticed that eleven of his young patients seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them.
Kanner named their condition autism—from the Greek word for self, autos—because they seemed happiest in isolation.
Asperger affectionately dubbed them his “little professors.” He also called their condition autism, though it’s still a matter of dispute if what he saw in his clinic was the same syndrome that Kanner described.
Attraction between people with similar genetic traits is called assortative mating. In 1997, cognitive psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen found that the fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were more likely to be engineers. Could assortative mating between men and women carrying the genes for autism be responsible for the rising number of diagnoses in the Valley?
At the same time, nearly every public discussion of autism was dominated by a rancorous debate about vaccines, based on the controversial findings of a gastroenterologist in England named Andrew Wakefield who claimed to have uncovered a potential link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (commonly known as the MMR) and a form of regression that he dubbed “autistic enterocolitis.”
With the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently estimating that one in sixty-eight school-aged children in America are on the autism spectrum, millions of families will be facing sleepless nights in the coming decades.
By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not “symptoms” of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness. A seemingly simple question began to formulate in my mind: After seventy years of research on autism, why do we still seem to know so little about it?
A maid wielding a broom once made the error of surprising him in a stairwell, and his swift response was to order the construction of a second set of steps at the rear of the residence to prevent such an incident from ever happening again.
Henry Cavendish was not a wizard. He was, in eighteenth-century terms, a natural philosopher, or what we now call a scientist. (The word scientist wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century, when it was proposed as a counterpart to artist by oceanographer and poet William Whewell.)
Charles—the Royal Society’s resident expert on thermometers—showed
Upon winning the Nobel in physics with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933, he told a reporter from a Swedish newspaper, “My work has no practical significance.”
resembled descriptions of adults with a type of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, first described in America in the 1994 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
unpredictability of an eleven-year-old’s life into a series of discrete and manageable
The book helped me realize that autism would always be a part of who my son is.” Instead of referring to him as low functioning, severely affected, or profoundly impaired—the standard clinical terms for kids like him—Shannon started calling Leo her “high-octane boy” so that she wasn’t constantly defining him in terms of his deficits.
Both sets of grandparents told Shannon they were relieved to see her stop treating her son “like a science experiment,” she says,
It’s more likely, though, that one of the primary factors contributing to the absence of girls in Asperger’s practice was the fact that teachers and judges of the juvenile court were a major source of referrals for his clinic. The socialization of junge Wienerinnen to be compliant and self-effacing—to fade demurely into the background—undoubtedly led young women to work extra hard to suppress the behaviors that brought their male counterparts to the attention of the authorities. Similar dynamics would contribute to the underestimation of the prevalence of autism in women into the twenty-first
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a tree with roots
At the other end of the hall, another statue depicted the Platonic ideal of the athlete, composited from the physiques of the “50 strongest men at Harvard.”
The honorary president of the congress was Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and telegraph. Bell had his own theories about the threat that people with disabilities represented to the future of the species. His mother and wife had both been born deaf, and in 1883 he warned the National Academy of Sciences that unless the use of sign language was vigorously discouraged in schools for the deaf, society ran the risk of engendering “a race of deaf-mutes.”
Teams of ERO investigators compiled voluminous “trait files” to tease out the role of heredity in such characteristics as woolly hair, protuberant noses, and “sinisterity” (left-handedness).
Eventually, more than four hundred thousand men, women, and children were sterilized against their will by the Nazi regime.
Of the nearly 5,000 physicians practicing in the city, 3,200 were Jews—a legacy of the Middle Ages, when medicine was one of the few occupations that Jews were allowed to enter, because doctoring in the era of the Great Plagues was an unenviable high-risk profession.
Before the Anschluss, more than 5,000 physicians were practicing in Vienna. By that fall, less than 750 would remain. Many former professors at the university—the brightest minds of their generation—died in concentration camps.
The Reich rewarded its loyal servants handsomely. Pernkopf was appointed president (Rektor Magnificus) of the university and given special dispensation to work on his magnum opus, an anatomical atlas called Topographische Anatomie des Menschen. This epic multivolume work featured lavish watercolor plates of each organ, bone, and blood vessel in the human body, accurate in every hue and detail. Praised by the Journal of the American Medical Association as “a work of art,” Pernkopf’s Anatomy became the go-to guide for surgeons all over the world who needed to brush up on their knowledge of
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IN THIS CLIMATE OF rabid fanaticism, on October 3, 1938, Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history, in a lecture hall at the University Hospital.
This is the story of Dr. J, the “mass murderer of Steinhof.” How can we dare predict the behavior of man?
The Austrian capital was nicknamed “the Reich’s air-raid shelter” because it was out of range of long-range bombers from England, and concrete Flaktürme formed a protective ring around the city like Sauron’s towers rising from the valley of Mordor.
The fact that two clinicians, working independently on both sides of the Atlantic, discovered it nearly simultaneously is still considered one of the great coincidences of twentieth-century medicine.
In recounting the tale of his famous breakthrough to his colleagues, Kanner compared himself to the legendary Persian prince Serendip, who “went out for a stroll one day, with no particular quest in mind, and unexpectedly came upon a hoard of treasures,” as he put it.
Kanner was taken aback when his hero Meyer showed deference to a man who didn’t seem to know his basic neurology. After Schilder mentioned that he had treated a schizophrenic teenager with psychoanalysis because the “sex center” and “fear center” of the brain are adjacent, he could no longer contain himself. Kanner pointedly asked if people call their spouses “honey” because the sex center and the sugar center of the brain are also close together. A pained silence fell over the room, and Meyer quietly instructed the stenographer to strike Kanner’s remark from the record.
In 1929, after a lengthy period of depression, he committed suicide with his wife, leaving behind a curious legacy—two buildings, on two continents, where two clinicians would claim to have discovered autism independently.
the modest quota of German immigrants allowed to enter the United States annually (less than twenty-six thousand) wasn’t even being met, in part because the State Department instructed consular officials to deny visas to applicants who might require public assistance. Jews could obtain visas only by presenting affidavits from American citizens providing proof of future employment, as Holtz had done for Kanner.
As she did these things, she would utter aphorisms that sounded like surrealist poetry: Butterflies live in children’s stomachs, and in their panties, too. Gargoyles have milk bags. Men cut deer’s leg. Dinosaurs don’t cry.
It was as if the children were constantly generating rules about how things should be based on how they were when they happened to come across them.
Epilepsy is now considered one of the most common comorbidities in autism, affecting nearly a third of the diagnosed population.
Meanwhile, four months after Kanner published his paper, Asperger submitted his thesis on Autistischen Psychopathen to his advisor, Franz Hamburger. His superiors had turned their focus of their efforts from the extermination of disabled children to die Endlösung der Judenfrage—the annihilation of the Jews. When Asperger’s thesis finally appeared in print a year later, his clinic lay in ruins.
By blaming parents for inadvertently causing their children’s autism, Kanner made his syndrome a source of shame and stigma for families worldwide while sending autism research off in the wrong direction for decades.
In fact, only two papers on the subject, not written by Kanner, were published in the next decade, while the volume of childhood schizophrenia research was worthy of its own book-length annotated bibliography.
Another father, he reported, read “mathematical treatises” before making love to his wife “in an inept fashion,” leaving her unfulfilled and resentful.
It may not have been strictly true, but it was a story that wove meaning out of the ragged threads of experience.
He took the advice of an old Communist who had managed to survive at the camp for four years and ate the disgusting soup that the Nazis ladled out for the prisoners with relish, because enjoying it was not something he had been ordered to do but a conscious assertion of his freedom.
He saw honest men become liars and strong men ground down until they were weeping hysterics. He felt that by noticing these things and deriving meaningful lessons from them instead of simply submitting to the process, he regained his pride and sense of himself as a human being.
While many staff members quietly considered the possibility that the children did have some kind of inborn neurological difference that made them unusually vulnerable to the influences of their psychological environment, their assumption in practice was that the primary cause of autism was bad parenting, and that years of milieu therapy could produce a complete cure.
Furthermore, unlike Kanner’s patients, they had no delays in acquiring language and did not speak in surreal aphorisms, opaque neologisms, or echolalic references to themselves in the third person. In fact, they tended to be precociously articulate—particularly when they were expounding on the subjects that fascinated them. (“One 13-year-old boy, after a brief acquaintance, wanted to talk about mortgages,” they reported.) These children only decisively withdrew from interactions with adults at the center when they figured out that they weren’t really interested in what they were saying.
He christened this genre “scientifiction,” even taking out a patent on the awkward term, which was quickly superseded by “science fiction.”
“When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain,” Tesla told an interviewer in 1926. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. We shall be able to witness
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Printed on coarse, untrimmed wood-pulp pages, these affordable gateways to awe and mystery (cover price, ten cents) became collectively known as the pulps
There was more fervent discussion of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the letters column of Amazing Stories than in mainstream science journals.