Simon Baron-Cohen

Hero or collaborator?

Reviewing Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, Simon Baron-Cohen, our leading authority on autism, wonders what really went on in Asperger’s children’s clinic in ‘Aryanised’ 1940s Vienna

issue 12 September 2015

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum.

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