Leave the pro-cure groups alone

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You act like I'm an NT coming on here to bash aspies. I'm not, I also have AS. I'm just not deluded into thinking that it's this great, magnificent diagnosis that has so many huge benefits and only one or two very minor drawbacks. Unlike many people on here I don't really see it as my personality. Sure, it's a part of my personality no doubt, but I'd like to think that perhaps I'm just a little bit more autonomous so as to have my own, unique individuality rather than one that is preordained and controlled by AS. If I were to wake up tomorrow and not have AS anymore I think the only things that would change would be that I would have a better gauge of how to act in social situations, I would find it easier to make friends, and I probably wouldn't sit in odd postures anymore (though in the latter case that's not necessarily something that would be missed seeing as how I ruined my spine by sitting in said odd postures my whole life). I'd still be a very logical guy, I'd still be smart, I'd still have an obsessive personality (thanks to OCD), I'd still be an atheist, I would still be a tech geek, I would still be creative, and many other positive things.

Anyway, in direct response to your comments (in order because I hate doing that multiple box quote thing):

1. So you're saying that Autism Speaks has an agenda to commit mass murder and/or sterilization against those on the autistic spectrum? Because handing someone a pill that cures them of social deficiencies is hardly wiping out the gene pool.
2. You can read my response to everyone else who raised that point because I'm tired of repeating myself
3. I was mostly referring to LFAs. But as far as AS is concerned, I do think that it's important to catch it as early as possible. I got treatment starting when I was 9 or 10 and today I'm MUCH better off as a result. On the flip side I've seen kids who didn't get treatment until their teens, if they did at all, and those kids are as socially awkward and oblivious as I was when I was 12.
4. I'm not referring to personality traits. I'm referring to aspies difficulty learning social skills and LFA's difficulties learning just about everything, as well as issues with sensory overload.
5. For you last comment about me "having no clue" tell me just what it is that I don't know. Because, you see, I think I do know this quite well. How do I know? Well I'll explain it to you:

"No doctor in their right mind is going to purposefully harm a patient (and this would be considered harming a person)."
Doctors are sworn to the hippocratic oath which binds them professionally to never harming a patient. Society would view giving someone a PDD like autism or AS as harming them. Granted some doctors may be willing to do this if it can be proven that this is what the patient truly wants to the point where it's almost a need, but those docs are hard to come by. Case in point: There are some people who, despite being perfectly healthy, feel that they need to have an amputation of particular limbs in order to feel "right" (which limbs these are differs from person to person). While some doctors have gone through with amputations in these cases, those docs are very hard to come by as most will simply refuse outright to do such a thing, even if they think that the person truly wants it to be done.

"No pharmaceutical company is going to pump out a drug that gives people a PDD."
Considering that society would consider giving someone a PDD as harming them, such a drug would be viewed as having no benign uses. So unless the company likes being buried in lawsuits it's not going to manufacture such a drug. Even assuming that it did become an acceptable practice to intentionally give someone an ASD, such a drug would still never get made because the profit motive wouldn't exist. There simply wouldn't be a big enough of a market to warrant the billions of dollars in R&D costs that it would take to make the drug.

"No scientist is going to research how to turn people into aspies unless they happen to stumble upon that fact in the process of developing a cure, or if they're doing some sort of weapons research."
Researchers working at universities are bound to ethical overview by their institution's IRB. Of the many ethical considerations are whether the research would benefit anyone. In this case, whether it would or not would be extremely controversial. As such it's unlikely that an IRB would greenlight research meant to figure out how to give people a PDD. Of course, once you know how to cure something you usually know how to cause it as well, which is why I said "unless they happen to stumble upon that fact in the process of developing a cure". Weapons research is thus the only way that such a goal would be deliberately met. And even then most researchers refuse to do weapons research due to their personal ethics. The ones that don't mind doing such research are usually already working for the government for weapons development companies.

You act like I'm an NT coming on here to bash aspies. I'm not, I also have AS.

I'm just not deluded into thinking that it's this great, magnificent diagnosis that has so many huge benefits and only one or two very minor drawbacks.

1. So you're saying that Autism Speaks has an agenda to commit mass murder and/or sterilization against those on the autistic spectrum? Because handing someone a pill that cures them of social deficiencies is hardly wiping out the gene pool.

3. I was mostly referring to LFAs. But as far as AS is concerned, I do think that it's important to catch it as early as possible. I got treatment starting when I was 9 or 10 and today I'm MUCH better off as a result. On the flip side I've seen kids who didn't get treatment until their teens, if they did at all, and those kids are as socially awkward and oblivious as I was when I was 12.

Yes, the "cure" is not to try to fix something that is broken in ASCs. The cure is for NTs to start accepting Aspies on their own merits as they are. That is the real cure. The cure for ignorance. Sadly, even some Aspies need to be cured to better understand the real problem here.

In fact, I do not "have AS". I identify as an Aspie, the personality-type, not the disorder, and I'm not likely to want to be labeled with the disorder.



It depends on which parts of the human neurodiversity-spectrum you have. Having high on talents isn't exactly an disorder. Having high on Aspie perception is a big problem in a noisy NT-world, but having hypersensitive senses isn't exactly a disorder either.



This will never become possible. The only possibility for Autism Speaks to eradicate autism is by prenatal testing and abortion.



I've never received any treatments, and for most of the time nobody suspect I have any autistic traits.

The reason why NTs don't accept us isn't because of our diagnosis. If that was the case then no one should ever get diagnosed. Rather, it's because of the traits of AS, namely the lack of social skills, that we get rejected. Go figure, you don't have any social skills, thus you can't interact well with other people, and thus you experience social rejection. Who would've thought?

For someone who doesn't want to be labeled you sure do seem hell-bent on making it a point that AS is a big part, if not the entirety, of your personality. Also, it's great that you never had to have treatment but judging from what you said it also sounds like you had a pretty mild case to begin with.

And this topic is about cures, not pre-birth screenings and abortions.

Not quite right. Aspies have trouble interacting with NTs, which mostly has to do with our differences in nonverbal communications and our differences in social preferences. You also must keep in mind that the diagnosis is a recent invention. Before the invention of the diagnosis, it seems like people were able to cope with their differences, and society was more accepting of personal differences. We could get back to this point again if we just accept human diversity.

And I don't exactly lack social skills in relation to most other Aspies. I've met several Aspies IRL, and it worked just fine without ever going into "NT-emulation-mode". IOW, if you cannot interact with NTs, there is always the option to actively seek out other Aspies. NTs is not a uniform mass either. Some of them are more accepting of diversity than others. You can simply ignore the one's that are not accepting of human diversity and / or that cannot adapt to function with an Aspie.

I'm not sure I'm so mild as you suggest. I went through school without talking, and I never interacted with my peers in school. Nowadays this would not exactly be judged as mild.

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The cure would be to correct whatever is wrong with the brain...

... early in childhood (or perhaps even prenatally)

There's nothing wrong with my brain.

So... eugenics.

No thank you.

There's a reason AS is considered to be a neurological disorder. Take a guess (hint: the root word of "neurological" is "neuron")

Do you even know what eugenics is? No, you don't, judging from what you just said. To give you an idea of why you're so terribly misinformed, a cure such as I just described would actually cause the genes for AS traits to proliferate, not be wiped out.

eugenic, a. and n.
A. adj. Pertaining or adapted to the production of fine offspring, esp. in the human race.
B. n. in pl. [after analogy of economics, politics, etc.] The science which has this for its object.

The cure would be to correct whatever is wrong with the brain early in childhood (or perhaps even prenatally) so that a person is able to learn social rules and non-verbal communication normally.

That doesn't require changing personality traits, but rather making it so that a person is able to develop in a normal fashion socially.

That's something else you forgot to mention in your reasons why aspies don't interact with NTs well: we're oblivious to social rules.

Also, do you have any sources to back up your claim that all was just fine and dandy before the advent of the AS diagnosis? Or are you just telling me your unfounded personal opinion?

That uh...that's it? You think have a moderate (or worse) case of AS because you had a strongly introverted personality? You realize that a lot of people without AS are introverts, right? One of the reasons why I say your case is so mild (if you have AS at all) is because of what I was like as a kid:

Ah, but I consider it a neurological difference. I understand that you feel disordered, but that is not my problem.



Yes. I do believe I know exactly what eugenics is.

But there is nothing wrong with the wiring of social and communication traits in ASDs. There is a difference that makes it impossible to interpret social & communication information in the usual innate way. There is no easy way around this problem. We simply must learn to interpret this information conscously. It is very possible to compensate for this (without pills), and most (if not every) adult Aspie have learned coping strategies that work. Since this is more like our "brain software" than anything wrong with the hardware, no pills could ever hope to correct this.



I doubt it. Seems more like wishful thinking than anything that will be available anytime soon. Regardless, since you are already 20 years old, you would never be expected to benefit from this. You simply will have to work hard to overcome your problems. There is no easy way out for you personally.



Only because we miss peoples reactions. As soon as we have learned to interpret people's reactions, we can learn the social rules.



I base it on the genealogy research I've done. There are clear examples of LFAs in my ancestry, but for the most part, my ancestors seems to have done pretty well.



No, I had no idea how to interact, but was able to mask all of this behind introversion. In fact, I didn't new I could get anything out of facial expressions until my late teens.

If it were our aim to use eugenics to eradicate AS then a cure would actually go against this goal since it would allow aspies to still pass on their genes, and at a higher rate as well (since with better social skills they would now find it easier to have sex and produce offspring).

And that "difference" is very likely some sort of brain issue. Something involving mirror neurons

and/or some problem with oxytocin and vasopressin perhaps.

And I wouldn't go so far as to say that biological manipulations will never be to correct psychological issues.

You can't have a mind without a brain, and even minute, subtle changes to the brain tend to have really big impacts on how our personalities and how we perceive the world. The mind is ultimately controlled by the brain, not the other way around.

This topic is about pro-cure groups and hypothetical cures, not how feasible it is. I'm working off the assumption that a cure can be found and that the positives will outweigh the negatives, simply because there's no evidence yet to suggest that such a case is entirely impossible.

Sorry but it is genocide if they are planning for future prenatal screening for autism and spreading fear as a form of "awareness". Gee what do you think will happen if a pregnant woman hears "sorry but tests result conclude your unborn child is most likely going to be autistic".

If you don't consider that genocide, shame on you. Perhaps you are just here to defend the rights of those who want to go forth with this "cure" What about the rights of autistics?

...
And I find it funny how you copy and pasted the definition of eugenics

without stopping to think about what it's saying...

eugenics: a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed

Tell me, what is it that makes AS a mere "difference" and not a "disorder". Because you can claim that any disorder is just a difference. Pedophiles love to say that pedophilia is just a difference in sexual attraction and that there's nothing wrong with them for being exclusively attracted to children. Cancer is just a difference in how your cells live and replicate. Suicidal depressives don't have a disorder, they just have a different outlook on life. At some point you have to clarify just what makes something a disorder. Generally that cutoff is when the "difference" starts interfering with normal functioning and causes problems..