Found, really cool website http://neuroportraits.eu/ "Portraits of European Neuroscientists"

"Neuroscientist" is defined very broadly, and these are historical figures. Here is the list of portraits http://neuroportraits.eu/portrait-subjects which includes Alexander Bain (...!) http://neuroportraits.eu/portrait/alexander-bain but neither Leo Kanner (maybe not considered European--his major work was done in the US?) nor Hans Asperger.

Re /m12980 there are also a few papers. The two that directly explored this question found that bilingual environments aren't harmful to autistics, abstracts here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21938563 and here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21947709 The UK group (working with the PACT children) which has now had two IMFAR posters about bilingualism hasn't published a paper yet. There should also be more upcoming from both UBC and McGill (I hope).

There have also been more descriptive studies e.g. about information and advice given to parents http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22268901

Aha, found: free pdf of a purely descriptive paper about autistic children in multilingual families. For a "narrative" qualitative type study involving autism it is pretty good, much better than expected http://autismdll.wikispaces.com/file/view/...ilingual+autism.pdf The study was done before any adequate data were published about autistic children in bilingual environments. It raises a lot of questions at the level of professional ethics, to say the least.

Vaughan Bell (of Mind Hacks) on the DSM-5 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/201...-uncertain-science/

There was a lot of DSM-5 autism stuff at IMFAR, as you might imagine. I did not see a lot of it. I did attend the improvised--it was not originally scheduled--presentation by Susan Swedo, who heads up the DSM-5 autism committee. It was disappointing, a lot more like a press conference (complete with mob) than a scientific presentation.

There was a lot of drama and self-promotion and self-pity on Swedo's part, and far too little time with the as-yet-unpublished (and apparently, incomplete, according to the flashed-by slides) field trial results. She also picked out and criticized--though not with actual data--two papers which have predicted a drastic decrease in autism diagnoses under proposed DSM-5 criteria. Again the direction was toward being as dramatic and so on as possible.

I had hoped for a straightforward rigorous explanation and presentation of the field trial data, and how these relate to existing published DSM-5 autism papers. I can't think of anything the DSM-5 autism "debate" needs more than a lot of good science and good ethics, including accurate discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of all relevant studies and data. But this is not what Swedo chose to provide, though she could have.

"If the four-fold difference in the new survey does not raise concerns about different incidence rates across states, why should a less than two-fold rate difference in surveys conducted six years apart raise concerns about an ‘epidemic’?"

That's Eric Fombonne from a Q & A about the massively fanfared recent CDC autism epi update http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/q-a/2012...s-rising-rates-real

Among other things, he is calling attention to the CDC's claim that the method they use for these epi studies is always the same, across sites and across time.