51Autism and Environmental Factors, First Edition. Omar Bagasra and Cherilyn Heggen.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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More than seventy years of research studying the arbitrary diagnosis of
autism has not resulted in any targeted medical treatments. Now is the
time to abandon the ASD diagnosis in research.
Lynn Waterhouse, Eric London, and Christopher Gillberg,
2017, The ASD diagnosis has blocked the discovery
of valid biological variation in neurodevelopmental
social impairment. Autism Res., 10 : 1182We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert
Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long
been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we
progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the
road – the one less traveled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a
destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
Rachel Carson, 1962, Silent SpringLegacy of Autism
In the last few decades billions of dollars have been spent, and are still being
spent, in trying to prove that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is genetic. Elite
scientists around the globe have discovered hundreds of genes that may be
associated with ASD; yet none can produce ASD‐like disorders in animal
models. Many genetic diseases in which chromosomal aberrations and certain
genetic mutations result in mental retardation have been added to the ASD
group, skewing the obvious fact that besides select rare genetic mutational
diseases (Table 2.1), the majority of ASDs do not show scientific proof that