Disease gets a bad rap these days, purely based on it having nearly killed off the entire species several times. But there is a silver lining in even the most murderous of dark clouds.

5 Autism Advanced Science and Technology

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Ever since it got the celebrity cause endorsement by Jenny McCarthy, everyone has diagnosed their progeny with the disease. But self-diagnosing parents aside, autism is a real disease with some serious consequences. Autistic people generally fail to develop normal social skills, and can become obsessed with minor details or systems that non-autistic folks consider insignificant. While the diagnosis covers a wide spectrum of disabilities, autism robs sufferers and loved ones of social skills like empathy and engagement.



Occasionally, they will find themselves trapped in a bad movie with Bruce Willis.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

It turns out that an inability to fully relate to other people or care what they're saying about you also is really, really helpful to a revolutionary thinker. So it should come as no surprise that many famous scientists have been retroactively diagnosed as autistic, including all stars Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The unnatural ability to stay obsessively locked on a task and not get distracted by this "life" stuff let them, to quote one expert, "produce in one lifetime the work of three or four other people."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Modern technology continues to benefit from the fruit of the autism tree. Thorkill Sonne (who evidently earned his name by slaying the god of thunder) founded Specialisterne, an IT consulting firm that hires and trains autistics to do software engineering problem solving for companies like Cisco and Microsoft, after learning that his son was autistic. Customers have found the autistics hired by the firm were five to 10 times more precise than the average person.