Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time

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Autism is an idiopathic spectrum disorder that affects the lifestyle of a great number of young people across the globe. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, portrays this autistic lifestyle through 15-year-old Christopher Boone; the reader is exposed to Christopher's: intensive logical and mathematical thinking, social deficits, and impulsivity. A few years prior to today, at Stanford's School of Medicine there were five conspicuous autism researchers trying to discover the secrets of this pervasive disorder and find a treatment to counter the effects on the future generations. Christopher Boone's autistic lifestyle includes an idiosyncratic set of aptitudes and behaviors. One of the qualities Christopher possesses…show more content…
Joachim Hallmayer described nominally as "the grandfather in the field of autism," holds a very significant position in autism research at the medical school (Sainani 49). Hallmayer is very involved in collecting data of autistic children. "He chairs the committee of senior investigators for the Autism Genome project, an international consortium of more than 50 universities that has collected data on 2000 families with multiple cases," (50). Also, his main research initiative at Stanford Medical School involves scanning the genes of autistic people for rare copy-number variants; CNVs are imperfections in chromosomes resulting from the fallible process of mitosis. The rare copy-number variants could strongly help determine about 10 percent of autism cases. Ricardo Dolmetsch is another autism researcher at Stanford Medical School. Dolmetsch worked with people affected by autism and Timothy syndrome, a disease that causes heart problems for the autistic. He discovered that "in addition to abnormal calcium signaling, kids with Timothy syndrome . . . have too few cells that form long distance connections and too many that form local connections," (51). Ricardo Dolmetsch's outstanding research initiative was the creation of brain and heart cells from tissue samples of autistic and Timothy syndrome patients, a major accomplishment that allows tests and other experimentation upon the autistic brain. The autism researcher, Antonio Hardan, discovered abnormal long distance connections in the brain just like Ricardo Dolmetsch. Hardan started to explore new brain imaging technologies such as diffusion spectral imaging, a technology that allows the depiction of individual axons, and MRI spectroscopy, a process that allows chemical imbalances in the brain to be viewed. Looking into imaging
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