MARKRAM MET HIS second wife, Kamila Senderek, at a neuroscience conference in Austria in 2000. He was already separated from Anat. “It was love at first sight,” Kamila says.

Her parents left communist Poland for West Germany when she was five. When she met Markram, she was pursuing a master’s in neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute. When Markram moved to Lausanne to start the Human Brain Project, she began studying there as well.

Tall like her husband, with straight blonde hair and green eyes, Kamila wears a navy twinset and jeans when we meet in her open-plan office overlooking Lake Geneva. There, in addition to autism research, she runs the world’s fourth largest open-access scientific publishing firm, Frontiers, with a network of over 35,000 scientists serving as editors and reviewers. She laughs when I observe a lizard tattoo on her ankle, a remnant of an adolescent infatuation with The Doors.

When asked whether she had ever worried about marrying a man whose child had severe behavioral problems, she responds as though the question never occurred to her. “I knew about the challenges with Kai,” she says, “Back then, he was quite impulsive and very difficult to steer.”

The first time they spent a day together, Kai was seven or eight. “I probably had some blue marks and bites on my arms because he was really quite something. He would just go off and do something dangerous, so obviously you would have to get in rescue mode,” she says, noting that he’d sometimes walk directly into traffic. “It was difficult to manage the behavior,” she shrugs, “But if you were nice with him then he was usually nice with you as well.”

“Kamila was amazing with Kai,” says Markram, “She was much more systematic and could lay out clear rules. She helped him a lot. We never had that thing that you see in the movies where they don’t like their stepmom.”

At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), the couple soon began collaborating on autism research. “Kamila and I spoke about it a lot,” Markram says, adding that they were both “frustrated” by the state of the science and at not being able to help more. Their now-shared parental interest fused with their scientific drives.

They started by studying the brain at the circuitry level. Markram assigned a graduate student, Tania Rinaldi Barkat, to look for the best animal model, since such research cannot be done on humans.

Barkat happened to drop by Kamila’s office while I was there, a decade after she had moved on to other research. She greeted her former colleagues enthusiastically.

She started her graduate work with the Markrams by searching the literature for prospective animal models. They agreed that the one most like human autism involved rats prenatally exposed to an epilepsy drug called valproic acid (VPA; brand name, Depakote). Like other “autistic” rats, VPA rats show aberrant social behavior and increased repetitive behaviors like excessive self-grooming.

But more significant is that when pregnant women take high doses of VPA, which is sometimes necessary for seizure control, studies have found that the risk of autism in their children increases sevenfold. One 2005 study found that close to 9 percent of these children have autism.

Because VPA has a link to human autism, it seemed plausible that its cellular effects in animals would be similar. A neuroscientist who has studied VPA rats once told me, “I see it not as a model, but as a recapitulation of the disease in other species.”

Barkat got to work. Earlier research showed that the timing and dose of exposure was critical: Different timing could produce opposite symptoms, and large doses sometimes caused physical deformities. The “best” time to cause autistic symptoms in rats is embryonic day 12, so that’s when Barkat dosed them.

At first, the work was exasperating. For two years, Barkat studied inhibitory neurons from the VPA rat cortex, using the same laborious patch-clamping technique perfected by Markram years earlier. If these cells were less active, that would confirm the imbalance that Merzenich had theorized.

She went through the repetitious preparation, making delicate patches to study inhibitory networks. But after two years of this technically demanding, sometimes tedious, and time-consuming work, Barkat had nothing to show for it.

“I just found no difference at all,” she told me, “It looked completely normal.” She continued to patch cell after cell, going through the exacting procedure endlessly—but still saw no abnormalities. At least she was becoming proficient at the technique, she told herself.

Markram was ready to give up, but Barkat demurred, saying she would like to shift her focus from inhibitory to excitatory VPA cell networks. It was there that she struck gold.