The Geek Syndrome

David Morris fqmorris at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 18 09:37:29 CST 2001


http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers.html

[...]
And now, something dark and unsettling is happening in Silicon Valley.

In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids 
diagnosed with autism throughout California. In August 1993, there were 
4,911 cases of so-called level-one autism logged in the state's Department 
of Developmental Services client-management system. This figure doesn't 
include kids with Asperger's syndrome, like Nick, but only those who have 
received a diagnosis of classic autism. In the mid-'90s, this caseload 
started spiraling up. In 1999, the number of clients was more than double 
what it had been six years earlier. Then the curve started spiking. By July 
2001, there were 15,441 clients in the DDS database. Now there are more than 
seven new cases of level-one autism - 85 percent of them children - entering 
the system every day.

[...]
For Rick Rollens, former secretary of the California Senate and cofounder of 
the MIND Institute, the notion that there is a frightening increase in 
autism worldwide is no longer in question. "Anyone who says this epidemic is 
due to better diagnostics," he says, "has his head in the sand."

[...]
The one thing that almost all researchers in the field agree on is that 
genetic predisposition plays a crucial role in laying the neurological 
foundations of autism in most cases. Studies have shown that if one 
identical twin is autistic, there's a 90 percent chance that the other twin 
will also have the disorder. If parents have had one autistic child, the 
risk of their second child being autistic rises from 1 in 500 to 1 in 20. 
After two children with the disorder, the sobering odds are 1 in 3. (So many 
parents refrain from having more offspring after one autistic child, 
geneticists even have a term for it: stoppage.)

[...]
It's a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers 
in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics - coming to work 
early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they 
code for hours - are residing somewhere in Asperger's domain. Kathryn 
Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning 
kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger's syndrome "the engineers' 
disorder." Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded 
focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all 
suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder. Dov's father told me 
that his friends in the Valley say many of their coworkers "could be 
diagnosed with ODD - they're odd." In Microserfs, novelist Douglas Coupland 
observes, "I think all tech people are slightly autistic."

[...]
A recurring theme in case histories of autism, going all the way back to 
Kanner's and Asperger's original monographs, is an attraction to highly 
organized systems and complex machines. [...]  Clumsy and easily overwhelmed 
in the physical world, autistic minds soar in the virtual realms of 
mathematics, symbols, and code. Asperger compared the children in his clinic 
to calculating machines: "intelligent automata" - a metaphor employed by 
many autistic people themselves to describe their own rule-based, 
image-driven thought processes.

[...]
The chilling possibility is that what's happening now is the first proof 
that the genes responsible for bestowing certain special gifts on slightly 
autistic adults - the very abilities that have made them dreamers and 
architects of our technological future - are capable of bringing a plague 
down on the best minds of the next generation. For parents employed in 
prominent IT firms here, the news of increased diagnoses of autism in their 
ranks is a confirmation of rumors that have quietly circulated for months. 
Every day, more and more of their coworkers are running into one another in 
the waiting rooms of local clinics, taking the first uncertain steps on a 
journey with their children that lasts for the rest of their lives.






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