The Eradication Project. They found ASD gene.

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I will post a derivation of Bayes' rule, since this :

Suppose you have four events: a, ~a ("not a"), g and ~g ("not g").

Write "the probability of event a occurring" as p(a). Write "the probability of event a and event g occurring concurrently" as p(a,g). Write "the probability of event a occurring given that event g is occurring" as p(a|g).

So the probability of having autism given that you have the correct gene (or, to use more accurate jargon, the correct mutation) is p(a|g).

Bayes' rule starts from the assumption that p(a,g) = p(a|g) * p(g) = p(g|a) * p(a), which makes perfect sense. For both things to happen, first one of them must happen ( p(a) ), and once one of them has happened, the second one must also happen ( p(g|a) ).

Bayes' rule uses the above equation, so that p(a|g) = p(g|a) * p(a) / p(g) .
p(g|a) = 1%; p(a) = 1%. p(a|g) = 0.01% / p(g).

We have no idea whether this mutation is a good diagnostic marker for autism unless we know the probability of the mutation. Using extremely crude statistics, in order for it to pick up half the cases of autism, p(g) must be 0.02%. If p(g) = 0.05%, p(g|a) = 20%, and so on.

Interestingly, Bayes' rule also says that the genetic mutation must exist in at least 0.01% of the population, if the research is correct...

Last edited by primaloath on 16 Sep 2010, 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

All of that suicide talk is really making me upset, there's been more than enough of it on WP, these days. You should all love yourselves.

Pezar, I attempted suicide twice during my teen years. It wouldn't have solved my problems - it would only have separated me from the problems, much as taking the bus (no pun intended) would separate you from your broken car without fixing it. Suicide would also have forfeited any future achievements, separating me from the means to do good things. A lot of people would still have problems if I killed myself.

Granted, when I did want to die, I thought I be going so badly downhill that I would never have the means to help anyone. This did not prove to be true - to the contrary, I began to thrive a few months later.

Nevertheless, suicide is not the topic of this thread; if anyone wants to start a new thread on suicide, please create a new topic and post a link here.

Lots of parents would. Mine would. Did. I would if I were willing and able to have kids at all (in fact if I were willing to have kids, since I'm not able to have kids, I'd likely want to adopt a disabled child since they often have trouble finding homes because nondisabled parents don't grasp that having a disabled kid isn't an automatic nightmare). My family has more disabled people than non-disabled people. To us, it's normal. (And yes, I'm what to most people would be called "severely disabled", and I have several different atypical-brain/body conditions. I'm less miserable than a lot of nondisabled people I've known, and really disabled people have the same range of happiness as nondisabled people except conditions like depression that are by definition unhappiness.) Honestly there are lots of people who don't mind having nondisabled children, would not decide that it was really important to choose a nondisabled child over a disabled child, etc. Unfortunately ableism and misconception prevent that number from being larger.

I love myself every night and many mornings.

Is existence better than nonexistence? Is nonexistence something to be feared or loathed? If one never existed, and never knew it, is that such a terrible thing (as opposed to being here, knowing it, and having it taken)? Is any existence better than none, or are there some conditions in which nonexistence is better? Could those conditions not differ from person to person? (case in point: Stephen Hawking chooses his body to be kept alive with ALS, supported by a ventilator and feeding tube, even though his physical capabilities are almost nil...many people choose not to take this course because that kind of incapacity is intolerable to them...I support the decision either way because I believe strongly in patient autonomy and know that what's intolerable to one person may be ok for another).

I guess what I'm saying is that we're making assumptions here that have been questioned by greater minds than mine and most of ours and getting kind of bent out of shape based on them. Some of us are fine with having AS/autism and even consider it a positive thing. I do not. I'm not going to rag on anyone who disagrees with me because I think we're all entitled to our own perceptions, opinions, and points of view....as *individuals*.

~Kate

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! !!

For all of the people bawwwing about how OMG AUTISTIC GENOCIDE THIS MEANS I WOULDNT HAVE BEEN BORN Q_Q, read this:
If you had been aborted, you wouldn't have even been born in the first place. Therefore, you wouldn't be able to know what you've missed. And honestly, this is a good thing. Just because you're autistic and your life is fine doesn't mean your experience is the same as all other autistic people's experiences.

That's one gene which affects one percent of autistic people. We're still a very long way from any kind of prenatal testing or the other Nazi BS agenda Autism Speaks and others are pushing. Good thing, too.

I think the main arguments against selective abortions is not that a certain person is alive and well, but that in current western morality (whch many, if not all who post here are influenced by), the individual is not to be instrumentalized. There's the whole religious strain coming with the argument that a person's abilities and disabilities are god-given and man should not play god. I'm not a religious person so I don't really understand that, other than that it's a good way of accepting ill fate an moving on. But even without the religious aspect, in western motality it is wrong for a society to marginalize a minority because that might improve the living conditions of the majority. If you think of handicapped people as of weak, as in need of charity, it is easy to come to the conclusion that in times of need, they should be marginalized to let the majority survive. But the majority of us here on wp lives in societies that can afford to help the 'weaker ones' to education and, in many cases, to find a niche to live and support themselves, so it shouldn't even a question that can arise!

(I'm reading through the social model of disability and have to say I think both the mdical and social model are two faces of the same coin. You can't just deal with one and leave out the other.)

I expect there to be found a number of independent and some linked genes that can cause ASD symptoms, and the number of them appearing in one individual determining the severity of the condition to some degree. What's more interesting would be to see which gene mutations can be tolerated or compensated, and which can't. It would also be interesting to see if PCDH-1 is one of the genes active in the Barr body of heterozygotous women, or if having it active in some neurons is sufficient. That is, do neurons have Barr bodies? Also, are alls PCDH genes on the X chromosome?

Some people make this wild leap from any genetic study to eugenic abortion.

Maybe the function of the PTCHD1 gene and associated proteins will provide a useful drug that helps people disabled by autism. Maybe the PTCHD1 pathways are associated with cognitive functions that can be identified and modified by training. Maybe the simple identification of PTCHD1 usefully explains an aspect of autism.

There is nothing malevolent, or even judgemental, in the article.

1%? Sounds like something that could be a statistical fluke.

How is this science anyway? "We'll, we've discovered 1% of how to make a warp engine, we've designed an engine casing and painted it green."

Ichinin, yes, it could be a statistical fluke, but with the statistical methods employed by responsible scientists, there is probably a 5% chance or less that it is a statistical fluke. If you're interested in this, try looking up "levels of significance". It's basically a way of figuring out how likely it is that the results you got were just the product of chance. Most scientists won't consider something to be significant unless the chance of having obtained that result randomly is 5% or less; some go by a 1% or less standard.

I have a standard search on "autism" sending me e-mails from Medline whenever a new paper is published, and there are papers on the genetics of autism coming out literally every day, usually when one or more cases of autism are associated with an interesting genetic mutation or an interesting gene. We're piecing it together slowly, and it's really starting to look like autism is something that is caused by the interactions of multiple genes, with multiple types for each gene, present in various combinations. Enough of them, and you have autism...

I read that Dr Julian Asher (Oxford University) has identified the genetic mutation and chromosome that is responsible for synaesthesia (successfull occurance) or cognitive auditory dysfunction (unsuccessfull - sensory dysfunction) to be dominant . . . another genetic peice associated with "autism

Maybe we will corupt their DNA and breed the NT's out of existance. over several thousand generations.

I can see many benifits in evolving towards a more autistic type of human.
Of course there will be examples that are unsuccessful and some that don't make it but we are possibly part of an evolutionary path towards a better sort of human, capable of using brain pathways in other creative ways to achieve levels of human potential seemingly impossible.

That's not really a cure. That's just killing people (or organisms that will be people) sooner before they grow up and start becoming a "burden". And let me get something very clear; I believe that the CHOICE to have an abortion should be there (even if parents decide to abort foetuses that may be disabled in their lifetime). HOWEVER, to make the assumption that disability=suffering is abhorrent. That is a dangerous stereotype. I didn't suffer as a child- I was happy, mostly (and there have been some f****d up stuff that happened in my childhood, believe me). Fair enough - I got support and you probably didn't and perhaps the expression of your condition is more severe than mine (I wouldn't know, of course). The point is that disability is not the main source of unhappiness and eradicating autistics (because that's what eugenics is- eradicating certain groups of people) is lazy and doesn't address the real issues behind the unhappiness of disabled people and their loved ones.

With that being said, I respect your opinion because I understand that you think that aborting a disabled foetus is an act of compassion (which, to some degree, I understand).

Fair enough, they found a gene in 1% of autistics. Are we aware of how many genes are needed to code for all the proteins that make up a human brain. Autism is obviously a polygenetic disorder, so do we eradicate all the forthcoming genes that will be found to have a slight influence on development of an autistic brain? This would certainly present a new host of ethical problems, I believe.