158 Maternal Twins and Male Gender Bias in Autism Spectrum Disorders
To find a Scientific Analysis of ASD Genesis
A scientist cannot intensely expose a pregnant woman to any synthetic chemi-
cal. It would be unethical and immoral. However, nature always provides
means to uncover its secrets. We have developed a unique in vitro (test tube)
model to determine if chemicals in fragrances can induce mutations. To figure
out what is happening to a fetal brain, a neuroblastoma cell based rapid and
convenient screening system for elucidating the effects of fragrances and their
selected chemicals on a special kind of Salmonella bacteria was developed.
This is called the Ames test. This was designed to elucidate the potential of any
chemical to induce genetic mutations. By utilizing the Ames test, we have
found that all the fragrances we tested induced significant mutations. This
strongly suggests that when a pregnant woman is exposed to a fragrance
(perfume) which is absorbed by the skin or inhaled by the lungs and enters the
blood circulation, it can cause mutations in the rapidly developing fetus. We
diluted the fragrances a million‐fold to mimic real‐life conditions. Even fra-
grance molecules diluted a million‐fold or so, with few molecules of the chemi-
cals entering the fetal brain, can cause havoc in the fetus’s brain. Destroying
only a few brain progenitor cells can, potentially, delete the whole faculty of the
future fully grown brain (i.e., amygdala, communication compartments of the
future brain) on fetal brain cells. Why are only selected cells of the brain
destroyed? We will come to this shortly.
If should be noted that whenever investigators report mutations in the ASD
genomes or exomes, SNVs, CNVs, and so on, they are looking at all of the DNA
of the ASD child, suggesting that these synthetic chemicals are inducing muta-
tions in the fetus’s whole DNA, not just in the brain. However, there are unique
mutations that are found specifically in ASD brains. For example, Uddin et al.
[52] have analyzed mutation in “exons” that are specific to brain. Their analyses
showed that specific critical exons were significantly enriched in individuals
with ASD relative to their siblings without ASD.
We think, at this stage, we should answer two crucial questions. We believe
that besides inducing random mutations, fragrances and many other synthetic
chemicals cause selective depletion or reduction in the developing fetal brain’s
neurons. For example, Torres et al. [53] have shown in many neurodevelop-
mental disorders certain chromosomal regions (1q21.1, 3q29, 15q11.2, 15q13.3,
16p11.2, 16p13.1, and 22q11) harbor rare but recurrent CNVs that have been
uncovered as being important risk factors for several of these disorders. These
rearrangements may underlie a broad phenotypical spectrum, ranging from
normal development, to learning problems, intellectual disability, epilepsy,
ASDs, and schizophrenia. The highly increased risk of developing neurodevel-
opmental phenotypes associated with some of these CNVs makes them an
unavoidable element in the clinical context in pediatrics, neurology, and psy-
chiatry [53]. We hypothesize that over representation of certain chromosomes