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EDITORIAL. From Thomas Edison to Elon Musk, the list of innovators with autism is long, leading to a change in outlook. Explanations.
By Peggy Sastre
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Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Cavendish, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, Charles Darwin, Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, Elon Musk… So many names, in no particular order than the one that came to me, having contributed to shaping our world and our way of life. Something that could be called a civilization and which therefore owes a lot to the way of seeing, doing and thinking of men with a cerebral configuration placing them somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
The fact remains that, some thirty years ago, it would probably have been difficult to associate these great figures of science and technology and, more generally, of innovation and “disruption” with autism, as we believed the syndrome characterized by an intelligence much lower than the…