Recently, I heard the latter portions of the radio version of a play, “Lucy” by Damien Atkins, relating to autism and produced by L.A. Theatre Works. “Lucy” was originally performed and reviewed as long ago as November of 2007, but I was not aware of it until...
A minimal requirement for evolution via natural selection is heritable phenotypic variation that affects reproductive success, or more generally, genetic success. The concept of heritability is often used somewhat loosely in casual non-technical conversation, but...
Perhaps the darkest years of psychiatry spanned the 1950s and 60s, when Bruno Bettelheim’s ‘refridgerator mother’ model for autism clenched the minds of public and clinician alike in its grip of ‘psychogenic’ causation – and the...
Mouse ‘models’ for psychiatric disorders, strains of mice genetically engineered by ‘knocking out’ a specific gene that mediates expression of the disorder, provide invaluable information regarding the genetic, developmental, physiological, and...
We usually consider medicine as a predictive scientific endeavor, as methodical in application as noble in purpose. But for some diseases, such as schizophrenia, the first treatments showing any effectiveness, including lithium, chlorpromazine, and even...
