Where Autism Got The Right Treatment In 2015

By bobb |

Opinion by Emily Willingham

It’s a pleasure to have the abundance of choices available this year in selecting the best online places to read news and views about autism online. Some sites stand out as reliably respectful of autistic people and disability in general, and this year offered up some truly remarkable storytelling about the past, present, and future of autistic people.

I started writing online about autism more than 10 years ago. Even as the Internet and social media were emerging as a gathering place, accommodation and access point to others that autistic people had never had before, it also was a place where one could stumble at every turn onto the worst of the worst: People who brutalized children with false treatments falsely promised, news stories that infantilized, belittled and dehumanized autistic people and an incessant drumbeat of fear and paranoia about that monster, Autism.

Illumina to make autism research available online

By bobb |

SAN DIEGO — San Diego-based Illumina announced Wednesday that it will take part in a “big data” project that will make genomic data of autism patients and their families available for analysis over the Internet.

The Hartwell Autism Research and Technology Initiative will upload 5,000 genomes involving autism from the National Institute of Mental Health genetics repository to Illumnia BaseSpace, a cloud-computing system powered by Amazon Web Services.

Researchers will be able to access BaseSpace to analyze the data and determine the genomic variation across the samples.