Did a little further digging and I found this on reddit.com (great site btw)
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What a worthless blogspam.
1) There's no pill. At all. The animals are genetically-modified in both cases, and, in both cases, in different manners/to different effects.
2) "Autism" is not able to be witnessed in animals. We can try to model some of its symptoms, but that's still far from anything close to actual autism as observed in humans.
3) By the same logic as this blogger tries to use, I could "make a pill to induce stillborn kids" (i.e., mutate a gene in a transgenic mouse line that causes an embryonic lethal phenotype) and then "cure" it (by breeding mice that don't have the mutation).
...so, yeah. These studies aren't causing or curing much of anything. They're simply attempts to figure out the mechanism behind some of the observable symptoms of autism (which, while a very good cause, is something very different from "inducing" or "curing" autism).
Also, this:
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Pill? Pill?!?
These are knockout mice, meaning they've had a specific gene damaged. It's not as though there's a recreational drug.
And finally:
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Yes they are mice with autism, but the autism was cured through something given to the mice
[Quoting one of the articles] "They then reversed symptoms of the condition by inhibiting the action of an enzyme in the brain...Researcher Dr Susumu Tonegawa stressed that the mice were not treated until a few weeks after symptoms of disease first appeared."
And if you can induce a condition through a knockout model, you can probably eventually induce the condition through a pill (e.g. target the protein produced by the gene).
The article was all hypothetical. They never said that today you can take a pill, they said maybe one day.
So nothing to get too much up-in-arms about yet.
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