19/02/2007

Dear Editor

As an autistic person and active advocate of “neurodiversity” I am more than a little concerned with the spin being given in the press following the publication of the latest research into the genetics of autism.

From the scientific viewpoint I am aware that this is only one more in a recent string of possibles, and that research is nowhere near a positive genetic test.

From my viewpoint I am already feeling threatened, in the way that people with Down’s syndrome are already threatened.

There has been so much negative and simply inaccurate publicity about autism that it has been hyped into a modern scourge like heart disease or cancer.

The fact that I am writing to you, that I am a post graduate student study at a leading University, and active at the highest levels in the largest organisation for autistic people in the UK shows that it is no such a thing.

Science fiction as usual has got there first, from Daniel Keyes story “Flowers for Algernon” through to Andrew Niccols movie “Gattica” and Elizabeth Moon’s novel “Speed of Dark”, the moral issues have been explored. Those very issues which the genetic scientists remote from the day to day experience of autism forget when they make their pronouncements about genetic screening and tailored drug treatments. It would be like a drug to cure homosexuality or left handedness, societies imposition on people who are different.

What is often also not realised when people like myself are responding to issues like this is that many of us were in our childhood a lot more “severe” than we appear now so the argument that high functioning and low functioning should be considered differently does not count for much amongst us, we will not be separated from solidarity with our less intellectual compatriots.

It concerns me that when the press responds to research such has been published in this journal, that the reaction of those researchers who are inevitably contacted by the press excludes the dark side of this research.

Science owes a responsibility to its subjects as Morton Anne Gernsbacher has recently written on our behalf in the APS Observer February 2000 Vol 20 number 2 that when we are so often talked about by the scientific establishment in terms that describe us as less than human the scientists should be brought to account.

Larry Arnold

Larry(at)larry-arnold.com