The Science Behind Autism and the ‘Developmental Disorders’: Tortuous or Tortured?

The history of coming to grips with what autism is and its etiology has been tortuous ― if not tortured. By 1908 the word autism was defined as a schizophrenic who was withdrawn or self-absorbed. Some decades later Leo Kanner [1] decided that autism was based on children with “a powerful desire for aloneness.†In the 1960’s psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, picking up on another aspect of Kanner’s [2] observations, thought autism was simply based upon mothers not loving their children enough. Then came the twin research studies which purported autism to be caused by genetics or biological differences in brain development. Yet the consensus that Autism is from an intrauterine infection had also been growing, bolstered more recently by Patterson’s [3] and Fatemi’s [4] studies. However, the question would still remain: which infection? This, of course, remains unknown. Until 1980 autism in the US is still called “childhood schizophrenia†and in some parts of the world, it still is. By the same token, there has been, for some time, an extensive body of medical literature which ties schizophrenia to chronic infection –some time before when Rzhetsky [5] in 2007, used a proof-of-concept bio-statistical analysis of 1.5 million patient records, finding significant genetic overlap in humans with autism, schizophrenia and tuberculosis.