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In the Barretts' home state of California, for instance, the number of autistic children seeking social services has more than quadrupled in the past 15 years, from fewer than 4,000 in 1987 to nearly 18,000 today. So common are cases of Asperger's in Silicon Valley, in fact, that Wired magazine coined a cyber-age term for the disorder, referring to its striking combination of intellectual ability and social cluelessness as the "geek syndrome." Wired went on to make a provocative if anecdotal case that autism and Asperger's were rising in Silicon Valley at a particularly alarming rate--and asked whether "math-and-tech genes" might be to blame (see box).
Yet the rise in autism and Asperger's is hardly confined to high-tech enclaves or to the children of computer programmers and software engineers. It occurs in every job category and socioeconomic class and in every state. "We're getting calls from school systems in rural Georgia," observes Sheila Wagner, director of the Autism Resource Center at Atlanta's Emory University. "People are saying, 'We never had any kids with autism before, and now we have 10! What's going on?'"
It's a good question. Not long ago, autism was assumed to be comparatively rare, affecting as few as 1 in 10,000 people. The latest studies, however, suggest that as many as 1 in 150 kids age 10 and younger may be affected by autism or a related disorder--a total of nearly 300,000 children in the U.S. alone. If you include adults, according to the Autism Society of America, more than a million people in the U.S. suffer from one of the autistic disorders (also known as pervasive developmental disorders or PDDs). The problem is five times as common as Down syndrome and three times as common as juvenile diabetes.
No wonder parents are besieging the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists in their search for remedies. No wonder school systems are adding special aides to help teachers cope. And no wonder public and private research institutions have launched collaborative initiatives aimed at deciphering the complex biology that produces such a dazzling range of disability.
In their urgent quest for answers, parents like the Barretts are provoking what promises to be a scientific revolution. In response to the concerns they are raising, money is finally flowing into autism research, a field that five years ago appeared to be stuck in the stagnant backwaters of neuroscience. Today dozens of scientists are racing to identify the genes linked to autism. Just last month, in a series of articles published by Molecular Psychiatry, scientists from the U.S., Britain, Italy and France reported that they are beginning to make significant progress.
Meanwhile, research teams are scrambling to create animal models for autism in the form of mutant mice. They are beginning to examine environmental factors that might contribute to the development of autism and using advanced brain-imaging technology to probe the deep interior of autistic minds. In the process, scientists are gaining rich new insights into this baffling spectrum of disorders and are beginning to float intriguing new hypotheses about why people affected by it develop minds that are strangely different from our own and yet, in some important respects, hauntingly similar.
AUTISM'S GENETIC ROOTS