The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  The International Space Station was partly responsible for the cancellation of the SSC. Both came up for a crucial vote in Congress in 1993. Because the space station would be managed from Houston, both were seen as Texas projects. After promising active support for the SSC, the Clinton administration decided in 1993 that it could support only one large technological project in Texas, and it chose the space station. Members of Congress were hazy about the difference. At a hearing before a House committee, I heard a congressman say that he could see how the space station would help us learn about the universe, but he couldn’t understand that about the SSC. I could have cried. As I later wrote, the space station had the great advantage that it cost about ten times more than the SSC, so NASA could spread contracts for its development over many states. Perhaps if the SSC had cost more, it would not have been canceled.

  4.

  Big science is in competition for government funds, not only with manned space flight and with various programs of real science, but also with many other things that we need government to do. We don’t spend enough on education to make becoming a teacher an attractive career choice for our best college graduates. Our passenger rail lines and Internet services look increasingly poor compared with what one finds in Europe and East Asia. We don’t have enough patent inspectors to process new patent applications without endless delays. The overcrowding and understaffing in some of our prisons amount to cruel and unusual punishment. We have a shortage of judges, so civil suits take years to be heard.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission, moreover, doesn’t have enough staff to win cases against the corporations it is charged to regulate. There aren’t enough drug rehabilitation centers to treat addicts who want to be treated. We have fewer policemen and firemen than before September 11. Many people in America cannot count on adequate medical care. And so on. In fact, many of these other responsibilities of government have been treated worse in the present Congress than science. All these problems will become more severe if current legislation forces an 8 percent sequestration—or reduction, in effect—of nonmilitary spending after this year.

  We had better not try to defend science by attacking spending on these other needs. We would lose, and would deserve to lose. Some years ago I found myself at dinner with a member of the Appropriations Committee of the Texas House of Representatives. I was impressed when she spoke eloquently about the need to spend money to improve higher education in Texas. What professor at a state university wouldn’t want to hear that? I naively asked what new source of revenue she would propose to tap. She answered, “Oh, no, I don’t want to raise taxes. We can take the money from health care.” This is not a position we should be in.

  It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the antitax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.3

  GARETH COOK

  Autism Inc.

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  WHEN THORKIL SONNE and his wife, Annette, learned that their three-year-old son, Lars, had autism, they did what any parent who has faith in reason and research would do: they started reading. At first they were relieved that so much was written on the topic. “Then came sadness,” Annette says. Lars would have difficulty navigating the social world, they learned, and might never be completely independent. The bleak accounts of autistic adults who had to rely on their parents made them fear the future.

  What they read, however, didn’t square with the Lars they came home to every day. He was a happy, curious boy, and as he grew, he amazed them with his quirky and astonishing abilities. If his parents threw out a date—December 20, 1997, say—he could name, almost instantly, the day of the week (Saturday). And, far more usefully for his family, who live near Copenhagen, Lars knew the train schedules of all of Denmark’s major routes.

  One day when Lars was seven, Thorkil Sonne was puttering around the house doing weekend chores while Lars sat on a wooden chair, hunched for hours over a sheet of paper, pencil in hand, sketching chubby rectangles and filling them with numerals in what seemed to represent a rough outline of Europe. The family had recently gone on a long car trip from Scotland to Germany, and Lars had passed the time in the back seat studying a road atlas. Sonne walked over to a low shelf in the living room, pulled out the atlas, and opened it up. The table of contents was presented as a map of the continent, with page numbers listed in boxes over the various countries (the fjords of Norway, pages 34–35; Ireland, pages 76–77). Thorkil returned to Lars’s side. He slid a finger along the atlas, moving from box to box, comparing the source with his son’s copy. Every number matched. Lars had reproduced the entire spread from memory, without an error. “I was stunned, absolutely,” Sonne told me.

  To his father, Lars seemed less defined by deficits than by his unusual skills. And those skills, like intense focus and careful execution, were exactly the ones that Sonne, who was the technical director at a spinoff of TDC, Denmark’s largest telecommunications company, often looked for in his own employees. Sonne did not consider himself an entrepreneurial type, but watching Lars—and hearing similar stories from parents he met volunteering with an autism organization—he slowly conceived a business plan: many companies struggle to find workers who can perform specific, often tedious tasks like data entry or software testing; some autistic people would be exceptionally good at those tasks. So in 2003 Sonne quit his job, mortgaged the family’s home, took a two-day accounting course, and started a company called Specialisterne, Danish for “the specialists,” on the theory that given the right environment, an autistic adult could not just hold down a job but also be the best person for it.

  For nearly a decade, the company has been modest in size—it employs thirty-five high-functioning autistic workers who are hired out as consultants, as they are called, to nineteen companies in Denmark—but it has grand ambitions. In Europe, Sonne is a minor celebrity who has met with Danish and Belgian royalty, and at the World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin in September, he was named one of twenty-six winners of a global social entrepreneurship award. Specialisterne has inspired start-ups and has five of its own around the world. In the next few months, Sonne plans to move with his family to the United States, where the number of autistic adults—roughly 50,000 turn eighteen every year—as well as a large technology sector suggests a good market for expansion.

  “He has made me think about this differently, that these individuals can be a part of our business and our plans,” says Ernie Dianastasis, a managing director of CAI, an information-technology company that has agreed to work with Specialisterne to find jobs for autistic software testers in the United States.

  For previously unemployable people—one recent study found that more than half of Americans with an autism diagnosis do not attend college or find jobs within two years of graduating from high school—Sonne’s idea holds out the possibility of self-sufficiency. He has received countless letters of thanks and encouragement from the families of autistic people. One woman in Hawaii wrote Sonne asking if she could move her family to Denmark so that her unemployed autistic son could join the Specialisterne team.

  I first met Sonne, who is fifty-two, in Delaware at a small conference he organized for parents and government officials who want to help him set up American operations over the coming year. He stood before them, sipping a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, speaking enthusiastically of his “dandelion model”: when dandelions pop up in a lawn, we call them weeds, he said, but the spring greens can also make a tasty salad. A similar thing can be said of autis
tic people—that apparent weaknesses (bluntness and obsessiveness, say) can also be marketable strengths (directness, attention to detail). “Every one of us has the power to decide,” he said to the audience, “do we see a weed, or do we see an herb?”

  It’s an appealing metaphor, though perhaps a tougher sell in the United States, where you rarely see dandelion salad. It is also, of course, a little too simple. Over eight years of evaluating autistic adults, Sonne has discovered that only a small minority have the abilities Specialisterne is looking for and are able to navigate the unpredictable world of work well enough to keep a job. “We want to be a role model to inspire,” Sonne told me later, “but we can only hire the ones that we believe can fill a valuable role in a consultancy like ours.” In other words, he’s not running a charity. It is Sonne’s ultimate goal to change how “neurotypicals” see people with autism, and the best way to do that, he has decided, is to prove their value in the marketplace.

  TDC, Thorkil Sonne’s former employer, is Specialisterne’s oldest customer. When I visited its headquarters in Copenhagen in June, it was obvious why the company finds it useful to engage autistic consultants. Whenever cell-phone makers introduce a new product, there are countless opportunities for glitches. The only way TDC can be sure of catching them is to load the software onto a phone and punch the phone keys over and over again, following a lengthy script of at least 200 instructions. The work is tedious, the information age equivalent of the assembly line, but also important and beyond the capacity of most people to perform well. “You will get bored, and then you will take shortcuts, and then it is worthless,” explained Johnni Jensen, a system technician at TDC.

  Steen Iversen, a Specialisterne consultant in blue jeans and a bright red polo shirt, showed me how he tackles the task. Iversen, who is fifty-two and has worked at TDC for four years, laid out several phones on a desk that also held his computer, two bananas, an apple, and lines of lime-green Post-it notes. He picked up a phone in one hand and demonstrated his technique, his thumb landing on the buttons in quick succession. But his real advantage is mental: he is exhaustive and relentless. When a script called for sending a “long text message,” Iversen keyed in every character the phone was capable of; it crashed. Another time he found a flaw that could have disabled a phone’s emergency dialing capability, a problem all previous testers had missed. I asked Iversen how he feels at moments like that, and he gently pumped both fists in the air with a shy smile. “I feel victorious,” he said.

  Over the years, Jensen has developed strategies for interacting with Iversen and the two other consultants he oversees. Trying to rush them inevitably backfires, he told me. “Sometimes I have to bite my tongue.” Jensen feels protective of the consultants and tries to shield them from the usual stresses of office work, but he is emphatic that the arrangement has endured not because he pities them but because their work is excellent. When Iversen finds a bug, he can recall similar ones from years past, saving Jensen the time and frustration of researching the problem’s history. And, Jensen says, the consultants are far more devoted to accuracy than neurotypical workers. Iversen has punched mobile-phone keys day after day, and not once has he cut a corner or even made a careless mistake.

  Christian Andersen, another Specialisterne consultant, works at Lundbeck, a large pharmaceutical company. He compares records of patients who have experienced reactions to Lundbeck’s drugs, making sure the paper records match the digital ones. Errors can creep in when the reports are entered into the company’s database, and tiny mistakes could mean that potential health hazards would go undetected. So Andersen searches for anomalies, computer entry against written report, over and over, hour after hour, day after day.

  Before Andersen arrived, his boss, Janne Kampmann, had a hard time finding employees who could do the job well. Most people’s minds wander as they go back and forth between documents, their eyes skimming the typos lurking there. Andersen, however, worked without interruption the morning I visited, attentive and silent until he lifted his head and, pointing to a sheet of paper, said to Kampmann, “Why do we have a fifty-seven instead of thirty milligrams?” Kampmann told me Andersen is one of the best quality-control people she’s ever seen.

  For years scientists underestimated the intelligence of autistic people, an error now being rectified. A team of Canadian scientists published a paper in 2007 showing that measures of intelligence vary wildly, depending on what test is used. When the researchers used the Wechsler scale, the historical standard in autism research, a third of children tested fell in the range of intellectual disability, and none had high intelligence, consistent with conventional wisdom. Yet on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, another respected IQ test, which does not rely on language ability, a majority of the same children scored at or above the middle range—and a third exhibited high intelligence. Other scientists have demonstrated that the autistic mind is superior at noticing details, distinguishing among sounds, and mentally rotating complex three-dimensional structures. In 2009 scientists at King’s College London concluded that about a third of autistic males have “some form of outstanding ability.”

  This emerging understanding of autism may change attitudes toward autistic workers. But intelligence, even superior intelligence, isn’t enough to get or keep a job. Modern office culture—with its unwritten rules of behavior, its fluid and socially demanding workspaces—can be hostile territory for autistic people, who do better in predictable environments and who tend to be clumsy at shaping their priorities around other people’s requirements.

  Most Specialisterne consultants work in the offices of the companies that use their services, but some need to operate out of Specialisterne’s more forgiving workspace. Even those capable of working onsite sometimes get into trouble. In one case, the company was contacted by a medical-technology company that needed help testing new prescription-tracking software. This seemed a marvelous bit of luck, says Rune Oblom, Specialisterne’s business manager, because there was a consultant on staff interested in illnesses. Everything was going fine until a medical team arrived to try out the software, and the consultant spent the entire morning recounting to them, in detail, the medical treatments that he, his mother, and the rest of his family had received over the years. Another consultant was assigned to finish the software-testing job. “I told him that the doctors were not very happy and felt he was a disturbing factor,” Oblom says. “But he couldn’t see it.”

  The consultant has since been moved to another company, where he has done well at his professional tasks but still misses social cues. In Denmark there is a tradition of bringing cake to the office on Fridays, and Oblom recently learned from the onsite supervisor that the consultant happily eats cake but has never volunteered to bring one himself. Then there was the time he tasted a coworker’s cake and pronounced it terrible. Oblom told me that he plans to tell the consultant that he has to bring in cake now and then—and he will do it, Oblom predicts, without understanding the reason—but he’s not going to encourage the consultant to be more polite. The concept of socially mandated dishonesty would mystify him, Oblom said, so the other employees will just have to deal with it.

  Specialisterne tries to anticipate, or at least mitigate, conflicts by assigning every consultant to a neurotypical coach. The coach checks in with the consultants regularly, monitoring their emotional well-being and helping them navigate the social landscape of the office. Henrik Thomsen, a jolly man who runs Specialisterne in Denmark while Sonne works on international expansion, told me about one consultant who is fascinated by train schedules. Severe storms can disrupt the trains around Copenhagen, and if the consultant’s train was delayed, he would start the day with a tour of his colleagues at the Specialisterne office, telling each how the commute played out, station by station. Sometimes another consultant would get annoyed and tell him to “cut the crap,” Thomsen says, “and then the real fun would begin.” So now Thomsen listens to the radio as he drives in, taking mental note of potential
delays. When Thomsen arrives at work, he invites the consultant into his office first thing, listens to the day’s commuting story, and then asks him to please get to work.

  Specialisterne’s headquarters occupy part of a three-story complex in a Copenhagen suburb. Sonne showed me around the building: in addition to the consulting business, there is a nonprofit focused on spreading the Specialisterne business model and a small school for people on the autism spectrum in their late teens and early twenties. In the largest room, boxes of Legos are stacked against one wall, and a pair of long, waist-high tables for Lego activities occupies the center, under a string of halogen lights.

  When Sonne started the company, one of his biggest challenges was determining who would be able to thrive as a tech consultant in an office environment. A traditional interview was clearly not going to do the trick, and he had to think of other ways to identify marketable strengths in people who have difficulty communicating.

  Lars had always enjoyed Legos, and in talking to other parents, Sonne heard stories about how the toy bricks brought out remarkable hidden abilities. “For many parents,” Sonne told me, “this was one of the few moments when they could be proud of their children.” So he decided to ask potential employees to follow the assembly directions included in the Lego Mindstorms kits and watch them build the robots.

  This turned out to be so revealing that assessing job skills in the autistic population has itself become part of Specialisterne’s business, with local government sending about fifty people a year to the company for five-month evaluations. (Specialisterne considers some for consulting jobs; others might end up doing clerical work, mowing lawns, or performing other tasks for municipalities.) The Specialisterne evaluators place the candidates in groups for part of the time to see how well they work in teams, in addition to assessing the skills (reasoning, following directions, attending to details) that are naturally on display in a Mindstorms session. The assignments also reveal how a person handles trouble. More than once a candidate has become derailed because a Lego piece does not match the shade of gray depicted in the manual. Yet it is also not uncommon for a candidate to notice a struggling partner, stop, and patiently explain how to get back on track.