Eric Courchesne managed to find a positive thing about getting polio: It gave him a clear idea of what he would do when he grew up. Courchesne was stricken in 1953, when he was 4. The infection left his legs so wasted that he couldnt stand or walk. My mother had to carry me everywhere, he says. His parents helped him learn how to move his toes again. They took him to a pool to learn to swim. When he was 6, they took him to a doctor who gave him metal braces, and then they helped him learn to hobble around on them. Doctors performed half a dozen surgeries on his legs, grafting muscles to give him more strength.
Courchesne was 11 when the braces finally came off, and his parents patiently helped him practice walking on his own. Through their encouragement, I went on to have dreams beyond what youd expect, he says. He went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. One day he stopped to watch the gymnastics team practicing, and the coach asked him to try out. Before long Courchesne was on the team, where he won the western U.S. championship in still rings.
When Courchesne wasnt competing at gymnastics, he was studying neuroscience. I understood a neurological disorder firsthand, and I wanted to help other children, he says. Fortunately, the polio outbreak that snared him in 1953 was the last major one in the United States; a vaccine largely eliminated the disease in this country. But in the mid-1980s, as a newly minted assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Courchesne encountered a 15-year-old with another kind of devastating neurological disorder: autism.
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At the time, Courchesne was investigating how childrens brains respond to new pieces of information. I encountered a clinical psychologist who studied children with autism, he says. She told me, Autistic children arent interested in novelty. Theyre interested in routine. Yet the young man Courchesne met showed more range. At first he responded to Courchesnes questions only with short answers, but when I talked with him further, I discovered he had a tremendous wealth of knowledge, the neuroscientist recalls. He had calendar memory. He just wasnt interested in being sociable.
Autism had cut the boy off from the social world, Courchesne realized. I could see his loneliness, and I could see his parents heartache, he says. He could also see that the boys parents refused to give up on him, in the same way his parents had refused. As they say, that was it, he says. He swung his entire career toward autism.
In the three decades since, autism has gone from obscurity to painful familiarity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 1 in 110 children in the United States are autistic. Yet the disorder remains enigmatic. Every turn of my research has been about figuring out how this thing began, Courchesne says. Gradually he built up a picture of the autistic brain from infancy to adulthood, zeroing in on a crucial distinction between those who have autism and those who dont.
As they develop, autistic brains bloom with an overabundance of neurons, Courchesne finds. It might sound like bad news, implying that autism is rooted in such a fundamental change to the structure of the brain that theres no hope of undoing it. But Courchesne says his findings could lead to key treatments in years to come.
Back when Courchesne began his work, the notion of a neuroscientist studying autism seemed a bit odd. Many researchers considered the disorder a psychological problem, perhaps the result of bad mothering. It was a medieval way of thinking, Courchesne says. As time went on, he became convinced that autism was not only a neurological disorder but more specifically a developmental disease that altered the structure of the nervous system as it matured.
Scientists had done a few anatomical studies on the autistic brain, but the results were ambiguous. Even normal brains can vary enormously in size and structure, so it was hard to see what, if anything, set autistic brains apart. To push past this confusion, Courchesne needed to look at a much larger sample of brains.