Larry Reiter

But in the past couple of years, as competition has intensified in autism research, Reiter has had trouble gaining access to new mouse models. Frustrated, he has decided to focus instead on fruit flies.

Reiter says he worries that others might be similarly discouraged. “People will shy away from working in this area, because they can’t get the mouse to work on,” he says.

On paper, most funding organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and SFARI — this website’s parent organization — as well as most scientific journals stipulate that once researchers publish details of a model animal, they must make the animals available to other labs (see list).

“Failure to comply with the sharing plan may be carefully considered in future funding decisions for the investigator and their institution,” says J.P. Kim, director of the Division of Extramural Inventions and Technology Resources within the NIH Office of Extramural Research.

In practice, however, many researchers intentionally delay sharing or don’t share at all.

“It’s sort of the ugly secret,” Reiter says. “There is a long and proud tradition in the mouse field of holding on to your mouse, sometimes for 20 years.”

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SFARI, January 2012.

But Corina Lynn Becker, an adult with autism who has a blog, wasn’t at all happy about it.

“A non-Autistic person still [has] the capability to text on their phones, and speak verbally, and so would not be totally comprehending the true reality of Autistic disability,” she wrote. “Twitter and Facebook are two of the sites that actually allow Autistics to communicate and connect with others in the community, so I will not be disappearing from the Internet, as it is my lifeline.”

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SFARI, November 2011.

Last month, Cleary was arrested for hacking into several major websites, including that of the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. He’s facing 10 years in prison.

Cleary’s lawyers have chosen what I think is a pretty lame defense: Autism.

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SFARI, July 2011.

Two proposed changes in the “bible” of psychiatric disorders—­the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—­aim to answer that question when the book’s fifth edition comes out in 2013. One change expected to appear in the DSM-5 reflects a growing consensus in the mental health field; the other has provoked great controversy.

In the less controversial change, the manual would add a new category: Complicated Grief Disorder, also known as traumatic or prolonged grief. The new diagnosis refers to a situation in which many of grief’s common symptoms—such as powerful pining for the deceased, great difficulty moving on, a sense that life is meaningless, and bitterness or anger about the loss—­last longer than six months. The controversial change focuses on the other end of the time spectrum: it allows medical treatment for depression in the first few weeks after a death. Currently the DSM specifically bars a bereaved person from being diagnosed with full-blown depression until at least two months have elapsed from the start of mourning.

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Scientific American, June 2011.

This time last year, Poul Thorsen, a Danish epidemiologist, reportedly disappeared after embezzling some $1 million of a research grant he had received from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Now a grand jury has indicted Thorsen on 13 counts of wire fraud and 9 counts of money laundering, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, which broke the story on 13 April.

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SFARI, April 2011.

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SFARI, March 2011.

The new institute, to be called the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, will focus on early-stage drug research — including large-scale chemical screening and animal testing — in order to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in later, more expensive stages.

As The New York Times pointed out, the need for new treatments ismost noticeable in mental health, a field in which the same handful of drugs that were prescribed 60 years ago are still being handed out. In the past couple of years, the pharmaceutical industry has taken a keen interest in autism, but most of its efforts to date have been in repurposing existing drugs, rather than creating new ones.

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SFARI, February 2011.

I had assumed — wrongly — that this would be true in all cultures. I was surprised to read, in an essay published earlier this summer, that some Muslim families embrace their child’s autism. What’s more, it seems that some aspects of Islam help these children develop stronger language skills.

For her doctoral dissertation, educational anthropologist Brinda Jegatheesan observed three South Asian immigrant families who have young boys with autism. All are practicing Muslims and multilingual.

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SFARI, September 2010.

In the capital city, Madison, 88 percent of primary school children with disabilities attend normal classes, in what the education world calls an ‘inclusion model’. Even in high schools, where the curriculum is more challenging and specialized, 63 percent of children with disabilities stay in regular classrooms.

A decade ago, children with disabilities were almost always separated into their own rooms — or even buildings — with specialized teachers and lessons. But some research since then has shown that many of these children can learn well alongside healthy children, and vice versa.

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SFARI, September 2010.

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Nature Biotechnology, July 2010.