ACCEPT, DO NOT CURE.
On January 30, 1933, a man who, nearly ten years earlier had attempted to stage a putsch (German for coup) from a beer hall, to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic, was asked to do something many believed unthinkable and would not last six months. This was a man who, the same year Roald Dahl and four friends plotted to put a mouse into the large jar of Gobstoppers, was sentenced to five years imprisonment, of which he served nine months, during which he wrote a book that few outside Germany regarded as being anything more than the ramblings of a madman. That man believed he would bring to the world an empire that would last 1000 years. Instead it lasted twelve years and three months and ended with his suicide ten days after his 56th Birthday.
That man, despite being short in stature, having dark brown hair, dark eyes and an olive complexion, valued men who were over six feet tall, of a muscular build with blonde hair and blue eyes, and presented them with a gold medallion in recognition of their perceived purity. There has been conjecture that that man had a Jewish paternal grandfather, something Hans Frank, former governor of Nazi-occupied Poland found preposterous, but as I can tell you, there have been white supremacists who have been found to have Asian or black ancestry.
The man I refer to is Adolf Hitler. His dream was not just to take back land that had been taken from Germany after the war, such as the Ruhr and the Rhineland, but to create a master race in Germany. As a geneticist will tell you, blonde hair and blue eyes are recessive genes, so if somebody with brown hair and brown eyes copulates with somebody with blonde hair and blue eyes, there's a higher chance that a baby will have brown hair and eyes.
Hitler wasn't the first, and he won't be the last. Modern society, with airbrushing of models, has been very much about perfectionism. It has been about making sure that models and entertainers don't allow scars and blemishes to be revealed.
Professor Tony Attwood has raised the possibility that autism genes have not been eradicated because it is the next step in evolution or it is useful to society, hence it has remained. Professor Tony Attwood is, however, the first of a minority of people who believe that autism is a neurological variation, as opposed to a disorder that needs to be cured.
I won't quite say that autism is the next stage in evolution, but I will tell you that it is important that we never find a cure for the condition. Why? Well, if autistic people are eradicated, it will mean that many of the great minds who have invented things that have changed the way we live our lives, such as telephones, will be eradicated with them.
Autistic people may be different, autistic people may be quirky, the level of intense interest and focus an autistic person may have in something that someone else finds of momentary interest may bemuse some people, but that doesn't mean that it should be discouraged.
Just like the man who wanted to create a master race brought death and destruction to the country he purported to love, this world will be a sadder and more boring place if it were to lose the autism genes.