Recently, genes have been implicated in childhood language disorders and suggestions have emerged about genetic factors in autism. International collaborative projects are bringing together clinicians and researchers to study the genetics of autism, tic syndromes, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and other developmental, psychiatric conditions. As genes are discovered, it will become possible to define the ways in which these biological factors affect maturation and function, and also to move towards early diagnosis, prevention, and rational therapies. Findings in the field of genetics also help to clarify the roles of the environment, including the transmission of risk, vulnerabilities, and protective factors within families and communities. As our field progresses, we will hopefully be able to call upon increasingly broad, rigorous, developmental theories in which the multiple factors that affect development can be accounted for and assessed.
International collaboration can help provide perspective and balance.
Since the first scientific reports on autism by Professor Leo Kanner fifty years ago, children with autistic disorders have been recognized throughout the world. They have been cared for and studied by child and adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychoanalysts, pediatricians and other professionals. To a remarkable degree, the children who have been reported in the world literature over these decades have resembled those first described by Dr. Kanner. The stability of the phenotype across time and place is itself a surprise, and a credit to Kanner's clinical brilliance. In addition to its importance as the most severe child psychiatric disorder, autism has served as the major testing ground for each new theory and concept about social, emotional, behavioral and developmental deviations.