AUTINET FORUM's Newspaper of the Year 2000

Find out below why I think the UK newspaper, The Guardian, is THE newspaper of the year 2000 in terms of assisting in speading awareness of Asperger's Syndrome. But, whatever you do read their article The high-flying obsessives.


Posted to AUTINET FORUM 21-Dec-00

Friends,

But for the comments of a newly subscribed member of AUTINET FORUM (whose story sounds most interesting and my hope is that he will introduce himself), I might not have noticed an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper

The high-flying obsessives

The article starts intruigingly well with

Remember the child in your class no one ever wanted for their partner? Or that furtive-looking microbiologist in your hall of residence, who never spoke but ended up getting a first? Or your train-spotting ex-boss? You probably dismissed them, more or less sympathetically, as nerds and geeks. But what if the reason they struggled on the social fringes but succeeded academically was because they had the form of autism known as Asperger syndrome?

and its fascination increases as it lists Wittgenstein, Einstein and even Bill Gates as possibly having Asperger's Syndrome or having autistic-type traits. It goes on to describe the change in our thinking over the last twenty years about the Autism Spectrum, the extraordinary increase in diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders (and it makes the remarkable statement that "Some researchers say one schoolchild in every 70 is now diagnosed with a form of autism", qualified by "including children with average or higher intelligence and no difficulty learning to speak. These are the ones categorised as having Asperger".

The implications are that "an awful lot of us are walking around with AS and no idea that we have it" (as this new subscriber from the UK appears to have discovered).

The article is about Asperger's "high-flying obsessives" and gives some excellent examples of successes who attend or have attended Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen's "Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service" clinic like Richard Borcherds, professor of maths at Berkeley in California, who says "I've spent most of my life in universities, where eccentricity is fairly common, which probably made me stand out less. Most maths departments I've been in have at least one person who is clearly weirder than I am". Or like Clare Sainsbury, daughter of Lord Sainsbury, the Labour peer and (UK) science minister, who was 20 and an Oxford philosophy student when she read about Asperger and recognised herself. Clare said "Being diagnosed was a huge relief. Finally to have a name for it, to be able to say, 'this is how Clare is and it's not that she's not trying hard enough or being deliberately difficult'".

The article even manages to quote Temple Grandin's remarkable statement "What would happen if you eliminated the autism gene from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socialising and not getting anything done" (well who knows?).

The article, together with another Guardian article comes up a pair of causative theories dear to my own heart [1].

It is a long article, but one not to be missed and probably this year's best article in terms of its service to Asperger's awareness. Certainly it has a clarity, coherence and readability that many others do not and a link to it will definitely go onto AUTINET's Web Page as soon as I can get to change it.

A letter two days later in the Guardian read:

'Karen Gold suggests both Wittgenstein and Einstein might have had Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism (Health, December 12). I made the same suggestion about the philosopher AJ Ayer in my biography of him. Some reviewers were sceptical, so I take comfort from Gold's fascinating article'.
[Ben Rogers London]

and other Guardian articles mentioning Asperger's Syndrome can be found at

Mummy, I do that [Guardian, Tuesday August 29, 2000]

Don't fail these children [Guardian, Sunday May 14, 2000]

Houses and feelings [Guardian, Saturday February 12, 2000]

How I found myself at last [Guardian, Tuesday January 4, 2000] (another great Asperger's article in 2000!)

In fact 14 articles in all match "asperger" on

Guardian Unlimited Archive Search

My view? The Guardian is my nomination for the "Asperger's Syndrome newspaper of the year"!

All the best,

Peter Wise
AUTINET FORUM List Owner

Note 1: Causative Theories (to my mind both involving "pattern recognition deficits")

• The high-flying obsessives [Guardian, December 12, 2000]:
  'The current theory is that the right and left halves of the AS brain have insufficient "central coherence" or pulling-together power to see the overall picture - may also be of benefit in work which requires very precise attention to detail'.
  [Now I wrote that on AUTINET FORUM a few years ago and was (politely) told it was "nonsense"].
• How not to read a face [Guardian Science update, April 27, 2000]:
  'A Yale team using magnetic resonance imaging scans has found that people with autism or Asperger's syndrome "see" faces as if they were objects. Humans are uniquely aware of faces: babies seem preprogrammed to respond to them. When most people look at one another, there is a lot of neuronal firing in what neuroscientists called the "face area" of the cerebral cortex. But in one class of subjects, the action was in an area other use for "non- facial" objects. But is this a cause of autism or a consequence of it? "This may be a result of a lifelong disinterest in people, and a failure to develop normal expertise for faces," said Robert Schultz, Yale's director of neuroimaging research in autism'.