Doesn't surprise me, working as I do in research. There are plenty of people with autistic traits varying from very mild to pretty obvious. There are also quite a few people who are almost manically enthusiastic about things and jump from one thing to the next.
However, what I have noticed is that the proportion of 'normal' people does seem to be increasing in the last 10 years or so, maybe because a lot more PhD students have been taken on, and a lot of them are doing PhDs to get an extra qualification rather than to dedicate their lives to research. There are a lot of people now who seem very NT and treat science just as a job. I noticed this in France (where pretty much everyone seemed to be NT and there were horrible social heirarchies). I worry a bit that changing expectations for scientists might be favouring the NTs and forcing out those that are a bit odd.
Whereas in the past the research, however esoteric, was all that counted, now you have to demonstrate that what you do will have social/economic/medical benefits (hard if it is basic research), compete, often somewhat dishonestly, for ever smaller pots of money, and have the ability to enthuse the general public for science. For example, all PhD students in my department now have to go into schools and tell children what they do as a required part of their PhD, yet a PhD was always traditionally purely about research. Some people are great at this and love it, but it requires quite different skills from being a good research scientist and not all of us have those other skills. In addition, as now there are so few permanent jobs, the competition is incredibly high and being good at research is not enough. Increasingly, the people 'winning' the permanent jobs (just 5% of postdocs will do so) are the ones with high levels of ambition (i.e. wanting power more than just wanting to do good science), skills in making the right contacts and having the confidence and pushiness to take every opportunity, none of which are traits that autistics are known for. As the autistics get pushed out of science, maybe the frequency of autistic children born to scientists will go down a bit.
15 Jun 2011, 2:44 pm
