A Unified Theory of Autism

Published: January 18, 2008, 5:05 am

Tags: environment, genetics, science, asd, aspergers, autism, autistic, children, dna, education, environment, family, genes, genetics, health, mercury, pdd nos, research, vaccines

Geneticist Michael Wigler has proposed a “unified genetic theory of autism.” Drawing on his work studying cancer genetics, Wigler took a different approach than that of researchers using classical Mendelian genetics; last year he published two articles about spontaneous mutation and autism. A March 2007 paper in Science suggested that large genetic events—”copy number variations, where large segments of DNA are duplicated or deleted–that arose spontaneously in a child (without appearing in a parent)“—could account for more than 30 percent of cases of atuism. A July paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA stated that spontaneous mutation accounts for 75 percent of cases and noted why some families might be at “high risk” or “low risk” to have an autistic child. Previous studies on autism genetics have searched for “single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)–substitutions, deletions or

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