Spectrum: Autism Research News

Magnetic fields can change the way neurons fire. That’s why John Elder Robison signed up for a trial of transcranial magnetic stimulation, which we spoke to him about last year. He hoped that the experimental treatment, dubbed TMS, would boost his ability to read people’s emotions — a skill that many people with autism lack.

But in a blog promoting his new book, “Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening,” Robison says TMS succeeded — and turned his life upside down.

“Before the TMS, I had fantasized that the emotional cues I was missing in my autism would bring me closer to people,” he writes in the blog, featured in The New York Times last week. “The reality was very different. The signals I now picked up about what my fellow humans were feeling overwhelmed me. They seemed scared, alarmed, worried and even greedy. The beauty I envisioned was nowhere to be found.”

Robison says he once felt “handicapped by emotional blindness,” but cautions that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

“Becoming ‘typical’ proved to be the thing that was truly crippling for me,” he writes. “Now I realize that my differences make me who I am — success and failure alike.”

The New York Times calls “Switched On,” which came out Tuesday, an “eye-opening book with a radical message.”

Australia opened its first autism ‘biobank’ this week at the Wesley Hospital in Brisbane, Queensland. The bank will store blood and other biological specimens from more then 1,200 families affected by the condition. Researchers will be able to use these samples, along with detailed behavioral information on their donors, to search for molecular biomarkers for autism.

“This will allow for the first time, on an unprecedented scale, a genetic discovery that we’ve never seen before in Australia and allow for earlier and more accurate diagnosis,” reads a statement about the biobank on the hospital’s website.

About 1 in 160 Australian children have an autism diagnosis, according to Autism Queensland — a rate much lower than the 1 in 68 figure reported in the U.S.

It’s been a year since Apple announced ResearchKit, a platform for creating smartphone applications to aid in medical research. This week, the software giant announced advancements to the tool that allow study participants using ResearchKit apps to share their genetic information with researchers.

The genetic data will come from 23andMe — a private company that screens an individual’s saliva for genetic variants tied to a range of traits and conditions. The service usually costs $199, but new customers can get it for free by ordering it through the ResearchKit app.

The announcement comes at a time when both Apple and 23andMe are facing pressure to release customers’ private information to law enforcement officials. So far, both companies have resisted.

What mixture of graduate students, postdocs and technicians makes for a productive lab?

Unfortunately, there’s no formula. But two new studies highlighted earlier this month in Nature suggest bigger is better, at least up to a point, when it comes to the make-up of a lab. And early hires make a difference, too.

Both studies make the somewhat intuitive point that the publication rate for life sciences labs increases with lab size. But they also show that the benefits max out when a lab includes 13 postdocs, or 25 people in total — a size that is rarely achieved.

Most scientists have limits on the number of people they can hire, both fiscally and in terms of available lab space. But the studies suggest that there’s an element of strategy involved in growing a lab — especially early on.

“The first set of individuals that you hire is very important,” Christopher Liu, lead author on one of the studies and assistant professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto, told Nature. “They set the tone for the entire laboratory.”

A deeply personal story in The New Yorker this week brings home the emerging science of schizophrenia.

The piece, penned by clinician-scientist and author of “Emperor of the Maladies” Siddhartha Mukherjee, chronicles the author’s family ties to schizophrenia. It spotlights the psychiatric disorder’s heredity in the context of a recent genetic breakthrough: Researchers found an increased risk of schizophrenia among individuals with variants in a gene that helps to prune the connections between neurons.

“The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess,” a psychiatrist referred to only as Hans tells Mukherjee in the article. “We grow, mostly, by dying.”

But this pruning is thought to go haywire in the brains of people with schizophrenia. The opposite may be true in autism, a condition characterized by an excess of neuronal connections. Beth Stevens, one of the researchers on the schizophrenia study, is exploring this intriguing possibility.