Sir

As a person with autism, I would like to respond to the ongoing discussion, by Allan Snyder (Nature 428, 470–471; 2004) and Oliver Sacks (Nature 429, 241; 200410.1038/429241c), about the links between autism and genius.

In my book Thinking in Pictures (Doubleday, New York, 1995) I was one of the first people to suggest that Einstein had traits of an adult with mild autism. He had no speech until the age of three. The statement I mistakenly attributed to Oliver Sacks was from Swedish psychiatrist Christopher Gillberg, who wondered whether or not the composer Béla Bartók or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein may have been autistic (An Anthropologist on Mars, Knopf, New York, 1995, p 295). Sacks described Gillberg as “one of the finest clinical observers of autism”, and he seemed to agree with the above statement.

I agree with Oliver Sacks that the terms autism and Asperger's syndrome are overused. I give talks at many autism conferences. When the milder diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome became popular in the 1990s I started seeing many intellectually gifted children at these conferences. I told one mother that, before Asperger's syndrome became widely accepted, her child would have received a label of ‘intellectually gifted’.

In my work I have observed many engineers and scientists who seem to have mild autism or Asperger's traits. One of my great concerns is that a child diagnosed with Asperger's or mild autism will be held back by the label and not have their talents (scientific or otherwise) developed.