The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens

professional-level success, she tried to create a threshold more closely aligned with attributes intrinsic to the child.
    Interestingly, the imprecision of using behavioral criteria to make a diagnosis is something autism researchers know all too well.Autism, like prodigy, is diagnosed based on external, observable symptoms, not genetic tests, blood samples, or brain scans.
    Austism was described in the 1940s by two researchers, Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, working on two different continents.Kanner was a psychiatrist who founded the Johns Hopkins Children’s Psychiatric Clinic, the first such clinic in the country.In 1938, Kanner met Donald T., a five-year-old from Mississippi. Donald paid no attention to the people around him, and his mother reported him happiest when left alone. Objects, on the other hand, fascinated him. Donald would spin anything and jump in excitement as he watched it rotate. His days were packed with ritual and repetition. When he spun a block, he started with the same side facing upward; he always threaded buttons in the same sequence. He had an excellent memory for faces and names, and he memorized a large number of pictures from the encyclopedia. His speech consisted almost entirely of parroting phrases he had heard before; his words often seemed unrelated to what was going on around him.
    Over the next few years, Kanner saw several other children exhibiting the same “extreme autistic aloneness.”Such children were often labeled feebleminded, idiotic, or schizophrenic, but Kanner was convinced that what he was seeing was a unique condition.He published a paper reporting on this new condition in 1943; the next year, he named the syndrome early infantile autism.
    Hans Asperger had the same idea at almost the exact same time. While workingat a children’s clinic in Vienna, he encountered a number of children who he believed shared a syndrome marked by social withdrawal and communication difficulties, such as problems with eye contact or an unusual speech pattern, as well as a high degree of creativity. Asperger emphasized that this syndrome could affect individuals of all levels of intellect, including the “highly original genius.”He began using the term “autism” to describe what he had seen as early as the 1930s, and in 1944 he published a paper arguing that the collection of behaviors he had observed constituted a new, independent condition.He called it autistic psychopathy.
    The conventional wisdom is that Kanner and Asperger were working independently and that their nearly simultaneous identification of autism—and the nearly identical names they gave the syndrome—was a grand coincidence of history.This view is shifting, however, in light of new evidence that Kanner worked closely with former colleagues of Asperger’s and thus might have been more familiar with Asperger’s work than he let on.
    But regardless of who identified and named autism first (and who knew what when), both Kanner and Asperger placed behavioral abnormalities at autism’s core. Kanner emphasized that the children’s “fundamental disorder” was the “inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life.” Asperger thought a key marker of the condition was “the shutting-off of relations between self and the outside world.”
    A diagnosis based solely on behavioral symptoms is inevitably slippery (just as Feldman discovered while selecting participants forhis prodigy research).In the early autism studies, scientists used differing criteria for autism. Two decades after Kanner first identified autism, he complained that it had become “a pseudodiagnostic wastebasket for a variety of unrelated conditions.” And this issue continues to plague autism, as demonstrated by the ever evolving
DSM
diagnostic criteria:autism has gone from a symptom of schizophrenia to a condition independent of