but probably won't.  I can imagine NT parents aborting probable autistic foeti, but not Aspie parents aborting probable NT offspring.  Someone needs to publicize the long list of weird people like us, who have made life better for everyone. I do believe we are the salt of the human race- we add the savor and flavor. (That's a Biblical allusion). Hell,  Vernon Smith, who recently shared a Nobel Prize in economics, has admitted to being an aspie. He's studied economics among humans as it's actually done, not as if we were all Adam Smith/Karl Marx economic robots. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see how things are done. I could list the usual names; Newton, Einstein, Jefferson...

Hmm I see I've started to do so.

Well, I think y'all catch my meaning, that it may not be good for anybody for all of us to be exactly like each other.

Hi Worsel, on the autism wiki we have a list of famous people who have, had, or likely had autism/AS.
You could contribute to the page if you like. I have not heard the Vernon Smith example before.
http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/wiki

I can't imagine how anyone could call Marxist economics robotic..

Here's a link to a news article from the New Scientist web site about the work being done at the Autism Genome Project of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, UK.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn7597

Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK is quoted in the article from a press conference in London. It sounds like he is getting very excited about autism gene research too.

Quote from article

I didn't realise that there is an "Autism Genome Project". I guess that's separate from the "Human Genome Project" :evil:

Its been running for a while, did you see the post from a member whose family took some of her hair and sent it into the project for testing without her permission! :evil:

I guess that might have been legal if the member was still a minor. It's a disgusting infringement of the member's rights though. A story like that certainly says a lot about the parents' attitude towards their aspie offspring.

I've got to wonder what it is that these families think they will get from cooperating with this testing? If they would like genetic testing to be available, they probably haven't figured out that they would probably be advised to not have kids at all by the experts. If a family already has more than one kid with and ASD diagnosis I would think their chances of conceiving a child without any autism genes must be nil. I don't know of any genetic study that is researching the positives of autism, so if these parents think they will be able to tell if a foetus is destined to be either a gifted eccentric or a disabled autist, they are fooling themselves.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if many families that have a member with an autism diagnosis actually have some undiagnosed genetic syndrome running in the family. Such families wouldn't need genetic testing, what they would need is a proper medical diagnosis from a competent medico.

If the parents want to help the scientists to find out what causes autism, I don't really think genetic studies are going to further scientific knowledge any further than thorough conventional research and a proper scientific background knowledge of brain development could do anyway. The answers to lots of questions have already been written in journal articles and academic books that are gathering dust on medical library shelves. If the parents want answers they only need to pull their heads out of their own arses and read some real books, and stop wasting their time listening to MMR frausters and thimoseral crackpots. If these families are curious about what autism actually is they could just ask their own offspring about their experiences and ideas. It ain't rocket science!