Doctors erradicate autism, humanity reverts to stone age

Everybody, please take today to do something nice for the (borderline) autistic in your life.

Research is not yet at the stage where autism can be detected prenatally using a biological test, but this may not be far off.

Such a test will need to prove itself clinically in terms of whether it is highly specific (in detecting just autism).

But assuming such a test is developed, we would be wise to think ahead as to how such a test would be used.

If it was used to ‘prevent’ autism, with doctors advising mothers to consider termination of the pregnancy if their baby tested ‘positive’, what else would be lost in reducing the number of children born with autism?

Would we also reduce the number of future great mathematicians, for example?

Or if this test led to some kind of prenatal treatment, such as the use of drugs to block the effect of testosterone which is already medically possible, would this be desirable?

If reducing the testosterone in a foetus helped that baby’s future social development, we would all be delighted.

But what if such a treatment reduced that baby’s future ability to attend to details, and to understand systematic information like maths?

BBC News: Autism test ‘could hit maths skills’