Neurodiversity

When a high-ranking government official announces a sweeping health initiative, the public usually leans in with cautious optimism. But when that official is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a figure long steeped in controversy—and the plan involves building a national autism registry using private medical data, eyebrows naturally go up. Touted as a groundbreaking effort to uncover …

Science has a long history of being confidently wrong. For most of the 20th century, the medical establishment held a view of autism that was not just incorrect but actively harmful to the families it affected. Overturning that view took decades of careful research, two landmark studies, and a gradual shift in how geneticists understood …