5

Doubt

No way was fast enough.

The lab became his home, as it had in South Africa.

Back then, ambition had driven him. Now it was Kai.

Humans feel for one another. Babies smile when their mother smiles. Children often cry when another child cries. That’s how we’re designed. Children start empathizing with others around the age of two or three. They can surmise another person’s thoughts, their intentions, their feelings.

Take this experiment by University of Southern California (USC) psychology professor Henrike Moll. She set up a puppet show for two-year-olds. The Cookie Monster walks on stage jubilantly, places ten cookies in a cookie tin, and wiggles away. A strict doctor comes on, looks into the tin, and says, “There are too many in there!” He takes out eight cookies. When the cookie monster returns, the faces in the audience change: they bite their lips, some open their mouths, a few even try to warn the cookie monster. They are empathizing with him. They know what the cookie monster doesn’t know and foresee that he’s about to feel sad. Psychologists call this ability “theory of mind.”

Empathy is fundamentally human. It allows us to understand each other, to live in a community. It’s what makes us social creatures. According to the old consensus, autistic people lack that empathy. They are not social. Take another experiment that involved a puppet show, one staged in 1985 by scientists Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith for an audience of four-year-olds who could already express themselves reasonably well. A puppet, Sally, leaves a marble in a basket and exits the stage. Another puppet, Anne, finds the marble, removes it from the basket, and hides it in a cardboard box. When Sally returns, the children are asked where they think she’ll look for the marble. “Normal” children say she’ll look in the basket. Almost all autistic children think she’ll look in the cardboard box. They lack empathy, the experts concluded.

This became an article of faith. The experts couldn’t agree on much about autism—so many causes, so many symptoms, hardly any disorder is as multifaceted—but they could all agree that autistic people lacked empathy. This perpetuated an attitude dating back to the discovery of autism, which viewed people affected by it as essentially flawed. The conventional wisdom was set.

This was more significant and tragic than it may sound. The scientific consensus, which saw autism as a deficit requiring correction, has had a profound influence on how the condition has been researched and medicated. Almost every study was built on the same assumption. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatrists and psychologists, which defines and classifies diseases, placed autism in a class of mental disabilities. This guided all further research. Some studies searched for the causes of the deficit. Others tried to remedy it. Hardly anyone considered that perhaps there was no deficit at all.

If anyone did come forward with such a claim, no one listened. If they requested a grant or applied for a scholarship, their application met the same fate as Henry’s dossier. Why should foundations support marginal opinions, particularly ones that were so obviously misguided? Even a layman will tell you that autistic people tend to be loners who sit awkwardly in a corner. It is no coincidence that all 625 patented autism medications were geared toward stimulating the brain.

One can assess this in two ways. One might say: autistic people just happen to have that deficit and assuming anything else would be nonsense. That’s why research is funded that focuses on it. On the other hand: What if they’re wrong? What if all research has been geared in that direction because no one has had the bravery or genius to question a false assumption or fund someone who does? A person like Paul Ehrlich, who at first was blacklisted and then won the Nobel Prize, comes around once a century.

Now, Henry Markram is far from being Ehrlich, but one would be hard-pressed to find a hundred people on the planet who understand autism and the human brain better than he does. And he had Kai at his side. At first glance, Kai seemed to confirm the old consensus, like the times when you called him on the phone and he spoke as if you were in the room, or when he didn’t understand your metaphors. On a second glance, however, or on a third and fourth glance, which you get only when you live with an autistic person, you could see that Kai could read you, that he could intuit your feelings correctly. An autistic person shouldn’t be able to do that, according to the mind-blindness theory of autism. Naturally, Kai could just be the exception to the rule. After all, four out of twenty autistic children had predicted that Sally would look for the marble in the basket. But Kai may also be something far greater: a well-placed example that calls the rule into question.

Henry wasn’t quite there yet. He was still working from the old assumptions when he resumed his research in Israel. Like everyone else, he was searching for a flaw—in his case, the faulty inhibitory neurons that allowed Kai to pet the cobra. If he located the flaw, Henry thought, a medication could be developed, one that offered genuine relief.

In the second phase, he would devote himself to the big questions: Where does autism come from? How can one cure it? There was only one way to do this, in Henry’s view: he had to replicate the human brain. It was about time. The new millennium had begun. Just as the rise of chemistry had revolutionized medicine, the new technologies of the age, particularly artificial intelligence, implied a coming paradigm shift. Wasn’t it every scientist’s duty to take advantage of the latest possibilities?

The Weizmann Institute was too small for this endeavor. Henry needed money, the most capable colleagues, and a supercomputer. It would cost many millions of dollars. The institute promised to provide him everything he needed, but could it really keep that promise?

Henry had an offer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They were offering him a chair and the possibility of grant money. He was on the verge of accepting when an e-mail popped up in his inbox. The EPFL, the university in Lausanne, wanted to become a leader in the natural sciences. The new president was a doctor, a geneticist and neurobiologist, and the vice president was a neuroscientist. They had big plans for Henry.

And so, he drove to Switzerland; it was the year 2000, shortly before he met Kamila. He introduced himself to his prospective new bosses like this: “I have an autistic son. And I think neuroscience is too divorced from real life. In my opinion, the best way to really alleviate this suffering would be to simulate the human brain. That would be my plan for this institute. I should also mention that I would not be instantly available. I first need to continue my autism research. I would need another two years to lay the foundation for such an institute. I would have to find the right people and collect fundamental data.”

“Okay,” they said. “We’ll wait.”

In 2002, having finished up in Israel and recruited a team of collaborators, Henry took them up on the offer. “I am ready now,” he said. “I could go to MIT, but I’d prefer to build something from the ground up. I will, however, need a supercomputer. It costs twenty million dollars.” The Swiss listened, stone-faced.

“Yes, that works,” they said.

The work began, or rather the preparation. It would take three years before he could even start what became known as his Blue Brain Project and another eight years before it would evolve into the Human Brain Project. Even bigger, even more unbelievable: the EU pledged a billion euros of research money. This made Henry the most prominent neuroscientist in the world, admired, envied, hated. It didn’t matter much to him. He was far removed from the motivations of academic life and was no longer concerned with acquiring knowledge and prizes. It was all about Kai, who sank more deeply into his own world by the day. Kai wouldn’t give Henry a round of applause when he got home. He was more likely to insult him because Henry had bought the wrong Christmas present, ordered the wrong food, or used the wrong words. This weighed on Henry, who day by day—on top of managing the brain project and doing his work as a neuroscientist—sunk more deeply into his autism research. Kamila was concerned to see him sleeping only four hours a night. His colleagues grew nervous when he hustled through the hallways, a restless spirit leaning in to inspect their data. It couldn’t go fast enough for him. C’mon, let’s give it another try—again and again. The lab became his home, as it had in South Africa.

Luckily, they still had Anat, who lived nearby and got along well with Kamila. Thanks to her, Henry and Kamila were free to spend all day—and often all night—steeped in research. Kai lived with her. She was always there for him, whether he was hungry, sick, or throwing a tantrum. She gave him unyielding love and comfort. She was there when others were not. She was, as Kai said himself, the best mother in the world. Henry and Kamila were his confidants on the weekend. They were responsible for bowling, hiking, the—structured—escape from everyday life. “What should we do?” they asked and offered Kai twelve suggestions. In the end, he liked them all and they just went bowling.