The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  Such swift achievement often attracted a fair bit of limelight. A hodgepodge of people from journalists to scientists clamored to applaud children who skyrocketed to the top of a typically adult field. National or international acclaim by adolescence, Joanne reasoned, might serve as a proxy for the runaway-train development pattern she thought characterized prodigy. It was still a behavior-based definition, but by focusing less on whether the child had achieved professional-level success, she tried to create a threshold more closely aligned with attributes intrinsic to the child.

  Interestingly, the imprecision of using behavioral criteria to make a diagnosis is something autism researchers know all too well. Autism, like prodigy, is diagnosed based on external, observable symptoms, not genetic tests, blood samples, or brain scans.

  Austism was described in the 1940s by two researchers, Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, working on two different continents. Kanner was a psychiatrist who founded the Johns Hopkins Children’s Psychiatric Clinic, the first such clinic in the country. In 1938, Kanner met Donald T., a five-year-old from Mississippi. Donald paid no attention to the people around him, and his mother reported him happiest when left alone. Objects, on the other hand, fascinated him. Donald would spin anything and jump in excitement as he watched it rotate. His days were packed with ritual and repetition. When he spun a block, he started with the same side facing upward; he always threaded buttons in the same sequence. He had an excellent memory for faces and names, and he memorized a large number of pictures from the encyclopedia. His speech consisted almost entirely of parroting phrases he had heard before; his words often seemed unrelated to what was going on around him.

  Over the next few years, Kanner saw several other children exhibiting the same “extreme autistic aloneness.” Such children were often labeled feebleminded, idiotic, or schizophrenic, but Kanner was convinced that what he was seeing was a unique condition. He published a paper reporting on this new condition in 1943; the next year, he named the syndrome early infantile autism.

  Hans Asperger had the same idea at almost the exact same time. While working at a children’s clinic in Vienna, he encountered a number of children who he believed shared a syndrome marked by social withdrawal and communication difficulties, such as problems with eye contact or an unusual speech pattern, as well as a high degree of creativity. Asperger emphasized that this syndrome could affect individuals of all levels of intellect, including the “highly original genius.” He began using the term “autism” to describe what he had seen as early as the 1930s, and in 1944 he published a paper arguing that the collection of behaviors he had observed constituted a new, independent condition. He called it autistic psychopathy.

  The conventional wisdom is that Kanner and Asperger were working independently and that their nearly simultaneous identification of autism—and the nearly identical names they gave the syndrome—was a grand coincidence of history. This view is shifting, however, in light of new evidence that Kanner worked closely with former colleagues of Asperger’s and thus might have been more familiar with Asperger’s work than he let on.

  But regardless of who identified and named autism first (and who knew what when), both Kanner and Asperger placed behavioral abnormalities at autism’s core. Kanner emphasized that the children’s “fundamental disorder” was the “inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life.” Asperger thought a key marker of the condition was “the shutting-off of relations between self and the outside world.”

  A diagnosis based solely on behavioral symptoms is inevitably slippery (just as Feldman discovered while selecting participants for his prodigy research). In the early autism studies, scientists used differing criteria for autism. Two decades after Kanner first identified autism, he complained that it had become “a pseudodiagnostic wastebasket for a variety of unrelated conditions.” And this issue continues to plague autism, as demonstrated by the ever evolving DSM diagnostic criteria: autism has gone from a symptom of schizophrenia to a condition independent of schizophrenia; the diagnostic criteria have shifted over time such that they encompass an expanding number of people.

  When work began on the most recent edition of the DSM, there was talk of developing diagnoses based on the underlying neuroscience rather than symptoms. But the new DSM offered no drastic rethinking. The drafters slotted some diagnoses into different chapters, combined some separate diagnoses into single conditions, added new diagnoses, eliminated others, and refined diagnostic criteria. But fundamentally, the DSM-5 maintained its symptoms-based approach to diagnosis rather than focusing on the underlying biochemical mechanisms.

  The entry for “Autism Spectrum Disorder” is a combination of what had been four distinct diagnoses (autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified) in the previous version. According to a fact sheet published by the American Psychiatric Association (the organization that publishes the DSM), this change was made in part because researchers didn’t think that these diagnoses were applied consistently across clinics and in part because it was thought that a single diagnosis better reflected the idea that autism symptoms vary in severity. But neither of these reasons has much to do with whether these symptoms actually stem from one distinct underlying abnormality or four.

  This emphasis on behavior leaves scientists in a quandary. As the prominent autism researcher Uta Frith once observed, “Behaviour, however reliably it is measured, is not revealing about its cause. There is a mapping problem. Many different causes can underlie the same behaviour. On the other hand, behaviour that looks different in different individuals may actually be due to one and the same cause.”

  Beyond the challenge of pinning down the definitions of prodigy and autism, Joanne faced another hurdle: her research pockets were empty, so she couldn’t travel to the children and their families. She had tried to get NIH funding, but her application had been rejected.

  She still wanted to do something, though, to at least find out whether her theory had merit. She didn’t need ironclad proof. She just needed something quick and dirty that could be done on the cheap to explore whether there was anything to the idea that autism and prodigy were connected.

  The answer came from abroad. The Autism Research Centre, an organization nestled within the University of Cambridge’s psychiatry department, operates as a hub for scientists studying autism. At its core was Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the most famous and prolific autism researchers in the world. In 2001, he and his colleagues had published the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, a test that measured a handful of traits associated with autism.

  It was a snappy little test. With just fifty questions, it was quick and to the point, and it was designed to be self-administered. Most important, it was free.

  Joanne thought she could use it as a canary in the mine for her theory. Autists’ family members often demonstrate autistic traits, just not at a level that would merit an actual autism diagnosis. Joanne reasoned that if there was a connection between prodigy and autism, maybe the AQ would show that the prodigies’ relatives, too, had some autistic traits, just like the autists’ relatives. She decided that if they did, that would be her sign; she would launch a full investigation into the connection between prodigy and autism.

  An autism researcher Joanne had known since high school agreed to make the AQ available to her patients and their families. For a control group, a local school distributed the AQ to families whose children had no documented disabilities. Joanne mailed the AQ to the families of some of the prodigies—those children who showed the accelerated development she was looking for—with whom she had been in contact over the previous few years. She wound up receiving ten completed surveys from each group.

  The responses—though relatively few—were intriguing. The autists’ relatives and the prodigies’ relatives’ AQ results indicated that both groups had e
levated levels of some autism-linked traits. Both had more difficulty with “attention switching” (the ability to multitask, switch between activities easily, and embrace spontaneity) and were less drawn to social situations than the control families.

  But the headline result, the one that Joanne thought might offer a real clue to the relationship between autism and prodigy, came from the families’ scores in attention to detail, another autism-linked trait. The relevant AQ questions measured the degree to which the test takers noticed small changes and absorbed patterns, dates, or other tidbits of information. In this category, the prodigies’ families spiked. They demonstrated significantly greater attention to detail than the control families and scored higher than the autists’ relatives.

  The results reassured Joanne that she was onto something. The connection between prodigy and autism, the one she had suspected since seeing Garrett and his cousin Patrick together seven years before, was not a figment of her imagination. But there was also a fascinating twist. The prodigies’ families’ and the autists’ families’ results were not identical. The prodigies’ relatives seemed to have less trouble with conversation and social niceties than the autists’ relatives, at least according to the AQ. It was a curious inconsistency. It seemed that prodigy and autism were connected in some—but not all—respects. A summary of Joanne’s findings was published in the fall of 2007 in the academic journal Behavior Genetics, revealing the first hints of a connection between prodigy and autism.

  In 2008, Joanne began a tenure-track position at Ohio State’s Mansfield campus, where she finally got her hands on some research funding: she received a seed grant—more than $13,000—earmarked to help new faculty jump-start their research. With money in her pocket, she could finally travel to the prodigies and begin digging into their cognitive profiles. Once she did, the deeper connections between prodigy and autism quickly began to reveal themselves. The first of these was memory.

  Chapter 3

  The Tiniest Chef

  By the time Greg Grossman was a toddler, the skinny New Yorker with the fluffy dark hair already had a wide palate. Fellow diners around Manhattan and East Hampton gaped, astonished, as the doe-eyed kid requested foie gras and other adult fare. “He’d order anything—anything different and weird,” his mother, Terre Grossman, recalled. While waiting for his food, he scavenged for ways to observe the back-of-the-house action. He climbed onto his chair for a better view of the pizza oven; he snuck into the kitchen to watch the chefs at work.

  Greg soon began experimenting in his own kitchen. At age four, he presented special candlelight dinners to his parents—often little more than a stuffed baked potato. At six, he used canned tomatoes to whip up his own pasta sauce. His recipes grew ever more sophisticated as he began sautéing fresh basil to add to his sauce and switched from limp spaghetti to al dente pasta. He began directing his mother as to what produce was in season when they went to the supermarket. “I would be buying stuff, and he would actually be telling me not to buy certain things, you know, ‘This isn’t ripe; it’s not in season,’” Terre said.

  Around the time Greg was nine, the complexity of his creations swelled. He began using a grill, an appliance he described in a school essay as an “infrared, propane masterpiece of stainless-steel.” His repertoire exploded. He went from riffing on classic pasta dishes to pairing melon carpaccio with anchovies and wrapping sushi with foie gras.

  That year, he prepared the meal that convinced him he wasn’t just messing around in the kitchen. With his father out of town, Greg urged Terre to watch television while he cooked dinner for the two of them. Terre stuck her head into the kitchen occasionally to monitor her child’s use of the stove and knives, but her worry was unfounded. Greg emerged from the kitchen unscathed, having crafted a meal that he would later declare his “first work of cooking art”: pan-seared scallops with a balsamic vinegar glaze and a wild mushroom medley. “It was so unbelievably good,” Terre said. “I totally freaked out.”

  After that, food was everywhere. The family television pulsed with culinary programs as Greg discovered a stable of talented chefs he admired: Jacques Pépin and Rachael Ray for bringing cooking to a broad audience; Andrew Zimmern for his use of exotic ingredients (Greg declared he would eat many of the bugs Zimmern featured but not the beating snake heart). Greg monopolized the computer, researching chefs and cooking techniques. He satisfied middle school world civilization assignments with reports on ancient food cultivation and completed science projects by experimenting with Scoville heat units and inspecting bacteria growth in kitchens. He saved his money to buy specialty food products, requested only professional chef products as gifts, and dreamed of owning his own truffle.

  Kitchen implements became contested territory in the Grossman household. For months, Greg hounded his parents for a new knife set. At first, the Grossmans refused. When Greg received the coveted knife set from a family friend, Terre nearly returned it. But after hours of watching Greg work with the knives, his parents finally relented: he was skilled and invariably careful. Their next battles were over fire (Greg insisted he needed it for crème brûlée) and liquid nitrogen (essential, Greg said, for ice cream and cotton candy). Greg won them both. “I was a little scared. What if I’m not home and he’s playing with some friends and something happens, the thing blows up or he burns somebody?” Terre recalled. “It was very, very difficult.”

  Hands-on training proved hard to come by. Most cooking classes that would admit a young person were geared toward beginner fare like introductory cupcake making. Greg eventually enrolled in a course for teens. His skill at the stove drew the attention of the instructors, who asked him to work at an upcoming benefit with them. Greg found an adult class that sparked his interest, but he couldn’t participate because wine was served during the course. He would have to find a different way to learn.

  Around the time he was twelve, Greg got a job busing tables and washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in East Hampton. When one of the prep cooks bailed on his shift, Greg stepped in, cutting carrots and peeling potatoes. He proved adept at the work, and soon he was filling in on this shift every week, eventually working as a line cook. When he was called on to run the pizza station, he made, by his mother’s count, forty-two pizzas in one night without burning a single one. Fearing he would be teased, he kept his job a secret from his friends.

  But it was the cafeteria at Greg’s East Hampton school that really jump-started his education. The Ross School Café, an eatery committed to “regional, organic, seasonal, and sustainable purchasing and culinary practices,” wasn’t a meat-loaf-and-mashed-potatoes kind of place. The chefs used vegetables culled from the school’s garden to produce spinach and shiitake mushroom salads and poached asparagus with miso scallion vinaigrette. For Greg, it was a haven. He lit out for the café every chance he got.

  When Greg was in fifth grade, one of the chefs at the café lent him a copy of a book by Ferran Adrià. For decades, Adrià had helmed elBulli, a restaurant in Spain frequently heralded as the best in the world until closing its doors in 2011. The book included stunning photographs of foods prepared and presented in fantastically unexpected ways. Greg was captivated by it. The ten-year-old carefully wrapped the book in paper to protect it and then devoured its contents. He searched the Internet for an inexpensive copy so that he could have one of his own. “That’s one of the things that really sparked my deep dive into cooking,” Greg recalled. “That set me off on this quest for creativity and technique and trying to figure out what the book was about.”

  Greg began buying food equipment and chemicals and experimenting with cooking techniques unfamiliar to many professional chefs. He hunted down information related to the science of food preparation and dragged his mother to food trade shows in pursuit of liquid nitrogen. He acquired cooking implements his parents had never heard of.

  The following summer, having just turned a whopping thirteen years old, Greg announced th
at he would no longer attend sleepaway camp in the Adirondacks. The camp lacked air-conditioning, there were bugs everywhere, and, most damningly, the food was terrible. One day in June, Greg accompanied his mother on a trip to Vered Gallery, an upscale art gallery in East Hampton where she had a business meeting. Greg perked up at the mention of an upcoming event at the gallery, a silent art auction fund-raiser.

  You’re having an event? he asked. Who’s catering? We just cut up cheese and do a few little things, the gallery owner told him. There is no caterer. Give me a credit card and a budget, Greg offered, and I’ll get together a few servers and do four hors d’oeuvres. The co-owner gave Greg $100 to work with. Just keep it semi-kosher, she told him.

  Greg hired two girls from school and told them to wear black dresses and black shoes. He hired a sous chef, a friend he was working with a lot at the Ross School Café.

  On the night of the event, Greg told his classmates turned servers how to pronounce the hors d’oeuvres and explain the ingredients. Relying on a tidbit culled from the Food Network, Greg told them that they needed to know what they were serving to avoid any allergy mishaps.

  For his first catering job, Greg served salmon gravlax with shiso crème fraîche—a raw, cured salmon appetizer. Other offerings included Thai chicken satay with citrus turmeric tzatziki and Indian spiced hummus with black sesame and curried nacho chip. For dessert, he prepared fresh whipped cream with peach gelée and mixed berries in a phyllo cup and chocolate mousse with lychee foam in a phyllo cup.

  After the event, the co-owner complimented Greg on his execution. The event was beautiful, she told him. Everything was wonderful. Her only complaint was that the citrus turmeric tzatziki sauce he served with the Thai chicken satay wasn’t kosher—an infraction that became a running joke because Greg is Jewish.