“I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.”

— Temple Grandin

Source: Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism a… 1947

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“They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman ISBN 978-0-399-18561-8, p. 428

“What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?

You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Source: The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's

“Right now, at my institute in the US we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks.
In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics. All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behaviour. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe that we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

To question genetic intelligence is not racism (2007)

“Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

“Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment.... An environmental stimulus... activates modulatory interneurons that release serotonin. The serotonin acts on the sensory neuron to increase cyclic AMP and to cause protein kinase A and MAP kinase to move to the nucleus and activate CREB. The activation of CREB, in turn, leads to the expression of genes that changes the function and the structure of the cell.