On 2 Nov. 2015 Steve Silberman, an American science and technology journalist (Wired; The New Yorker; TIME; Nature; Salon), was awarded the British most prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for his non-fiction book Neurotribes. Anne Applebaum, chair of judges, comments: "Silberman’s ground-breaking archival research lays out the intellectual history of the condition we now call “autism,” tracing the evolution of the diagnosis from Nazi Vienna up until the present day, explaining how political and social context shaped scientific and medical perspectives."

Along the way, during his many interviews with Silicon Valley innovators, Silberman had come across the fact that many of them had "autistic" children. Was it, Silberman wondered, a special genetic predisposition that on the one hand allowed people to become extremely successful engineers and programmers, while on the other hand that same predisposition led to their progeny's  "autism disorder" diagnosis?  

"Silberman went in search of the deep history of autism. It was a journey that led him to explore not only America’s infatuation with Freud, then with behaviourism, but also the murky archives of Nazi-era Vienna and the legacy of eugenics."  (Saskia Baron, The Guardian, 23 Aug. 2015)

"Neurotribes reveals not only the multifaceted features of the neurotribe known as autistic people but also the affiliative inclinations of all humans, the way we gather, clamoring, and build exclusive ways of being around shared beliefs - for better and for worse." (Emily Willingham on blogs.plos.org  5 Nov. 2015 )

Neurotribes has been published August 2015 by Allen & Unwin (£16.99)