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“In case you think I am just making some sort of wild speculation here about Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon coming true, think again. In Keyes’s story, a mentally disabled janitor named Charlie is healed of his handicap with an experimental medical procedure shortly after it does the same for a mouse named Algernon.10 Charlie’s tale was the stuff of fiction when it was written in the 1950s, but—based upon work being done in cellular biology—it does not look as if it will remain fiction for much longer. Robert Naviaux, a cellular biologist at UC San Diego, was fascinated by autistic savants and curious about what precisely was happening in their brains that granted them their incredible abilities. “Neurons that are developing contacts in the brain ‘look’ for little lights in the darkness, the metabolic activity of other neurons that have been activated by use,” explained Dr. Naviaux. Once they find these lights, they send out projections called axons to handshake with them and form connections.”

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“This is why play and communication, and giggling and the recognition of mother’s face, are so important in the first year of life. The physical and mental use of neural circuits makes cells ‘light up’ with metabolic activity so neurons can find one another and make new connections, sometimes at long distances in the brain.” Yet, this connection making can go wrong. “When cells suspect danger, they resist sending out the longer connections. Their axons are shorter and they have fewer branches. However, even though they send out fewer long axons, neurons still engage in local activity as the drive to make connections during early development is very strong,” said Dr. Naviaux. The result is a brain filled with isolated islands of superconnectivity that can perform specific tasks at remarkable speeds.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
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“Dr. Naviaux knew that the cellular danger response took effect when cells were “told” by organic compounds in the blood, called purines, to stop performing their ordinary services and activate defensive systems to stave off attack from viruses or toxic chemicals. Moreover, he suspected that when the danger response was activated in young children, the purines sometimes just kept circulating nonstop and left neurons in permanent defensive lockdown. If this was so, then he theorized that targeting the purine activity could potentially end the lockdown, allow the neurons to make long connections again, and treat the autism. Dr. Naviaux set up an experiment with mice. He knew from past work that if female mice were infected with a virus midpregnancy, their offspring would be born with brains in defensive lockdown and exhibit autistic behaviors such as fear of novelty and difficulty interacting with other mice.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
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“A drug called suramin was already on the market for the treatment of the sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly in Africa and was known to bind to purine receptors on cells found throughout the body. Dr. Naviaux used it on both autistic and nonautistic mice when they were six months old.IV The mice were then tested on how well they interacted with mice they had never before met, and on whether they preferred sameness when put through mazes, as many autistic humans do. Suramin levels in the blood declined naturally, dropping by half for every week that passed after the initial dose. When five weeks had passed, the mice were put through the tests one final time. Throughout the study, a few mice were sacrificed from both the control and the experimental groups so the biochemistry of their neurons could be analyzed. Dr. Naviaux and his colleagues reported in Translation Psychiatry in 2014 that while some brain cells, called Purkinje cells, that would normally be found in healthy brains did not suddenly reemerge in these autistic mice, suramin ended the cellular defensive lockdown. Moreover, the team discovered major behavioral changes in these animals.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
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“Mice that had initially shown a fear of stranger mice showed no sign of this behavior after they were treated with suramin. They behaved like ordinary mice for as long as the suramin was in their systems. After five weeks, when the suramin was effectively gone, their autistic behavior returned. Whether blocking purines will have the same effect in people needs to be tested. Moreover, suramin has a long-term toxic effect, so a safer alternative needs to be found. Nevertheless, that an autistic human could potentially be granted a normal life with a single drug is amazing. Yet, as I worked through Dr. Naviaux’s papers one thought lingered: Would an autistic savant want an ordinary life?”

MindSuperhumanSavant
Author:Matt Kaplan
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“If you could learn entire languages in a week, draw perfect pictures without thinking about it, and make complex calculations in your head in seconds, would you be willing to trade that for the ability to comfortably walk into a coffee shop and shake a stranger’s hand? My thoughts went racing to modern comic mythology such as X-Men: The Last Stand, in which mutants are presented with a drug that could make them normal by robbing them of their powers. Would purine treatment in autistic savants be the same sort of thing? I had to know, so I asked Dr. Naviaux, “Will savants lose their mutant powers if we cure them? “Treating an autistic savant with a purine inhibitor should not change his or her extraordinary abilities at all,” he said. The hyperconnected islands of neurons that were formed when an autism patient was young would still be there. The powers that the islands grant would still be available, but they would no longer be the only neural connections available. “In younger patients in particular, new connections, longer ones, stand a good chance of forming once the danger response is shut down by a purine blocker,” says Dr. Naviaux. The result? A superhuman mind without the burden of autism. Wow.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
Author:Matt Kaplan
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