Erin’s boys benefited from their DAN! doctor, she says, but it was in 2003, when she switched to a highly unconventional molecular biologist and naturopath based in Maine, Amy Yasko, that she began to see more striking changes. Yasko blends the new findings on methylation with a scientist’s background in the finer steps of fundamental detoxification pathways in the body. However, she largely favors herbs, dietary change, and nutritional supplements over prescription medications. She monitors biomarkers of detoxification in the urine as often as every week or two and tweaks supplements accordingly. Her program is intensive and steeped in molecular biology; her twice-yearly conferences are extremely dense, scientific, and intended to help parents become at least semiproficient in the biology and chemistry themselves. It is a far cry from the old doctor-patient model—Yasko works primarily on the Internet now, with phone consultations, to interpret test results. She decided to do this when her waiting list for individuals stretched to five years, and, she says, she felt she was not helping enough children. Erin e-mailed me about 40 charts of metal “dumps” for both of her boys—urinalyses Yasko had ordered and charted on a graph to show the excretion of everything from arsenic to aluminum, mercury, and lead over time. “All these little things started clicking after we started with her,” says Erin.

“I call this approach biomolecular nutrigenomics, after Bruce Ames, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley,” says Yasko. “He said that someday it would become routine to screen individuals for polymorphisms and that nutritional interventions to improve health were likely be a major benefit of the genomics area.” Yasko tests for common polymorphisms in the methylation pathway, even though these findings are still preliminary. This has made her controversial among her peers. Yet several doctors and scientists with autistic children admitted privately to using Yasko’s services while being unwilling to go on the record to support her.

Yasko, who says she moved her husband and three daughters from Connecticut to a rural area of Maine to “hear the snowflakes fall on the snow and get to that quiet place inside where I can think,” seems immune to the controversy. “I was in a research environment for a long time, where you had to publish. Then I was in biotech for a long time, where you had to keep everything quiet. When I began to focus on autistic children, I made a decision that instead of publishing in peer review journals, I was going to go directly to the moms and help them. I knew in making that decision I was going to get flak. That’s OK. It was like I was on those cliffs you see in the movies, and you’re going to jump. You don’t know if there’s water below, or enough momentum to get to the other side, but you just jump.”


Can we cajole a mysteriously shuttered brain and body back toward normal? And if so, will autism give us new insight into other disorders?

Today Erin’s boys participate in individualized programs at school and are being monitored in two national studies of families with more than one autistic child—one at the Duke Center for Human Genetics, another at the University of Washington. Kyle has, in addition, been tested three times at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center’s toddler development program. Both are still on the autism spectrum—but the incessant tantrums, digestive problems, and infections have vanished. Brendan no longer chews on his shirt, flaps his arms, and grinds his teeth. In fact, he made honor roll in his classes last year. Kelly Swift, the boys’ schoolteacher since the autumn of 1996, describes them as “sociable and on the whole very happy, with a great sense of humor. Kyle is probably the most changed of any autistic child I’ve ever worked with.”

Kyle, who stopped speaking entirely at age 2, is now a font of creative language. I know this because Erin and the boys spent a weekend at my house. At lunch, Kyle poured a Vesuvius of ketchup onto his plate and began transforming his french fries into boats that sailed across the ketchup before they were disposed of in his mouth; he then began to entertain us by pretending he was an announcer at a regatta, where he, of course, was winning the race. What had once been autism had erupted into a geyser of quirky creativity.

The boys’ blossoming, according to their mom, is one not easily measured on tests. “It’s the length of their sentences, their empathy and sense of humor. Last night we went by a house that was all lit up for the holidays and Kyle joked, ‘Does that guy want to be seen from space?’ When we used to take Kyle to the dentist, he would scream bloody murder and we’d try to papoose him—put him on a board and wrap him in sheets, but even that didn’t work, so they put him to sleep just to clean his teeth. Last year we went to the dentist, and he heard a little boy crying, walked over to him, rubbed his back, told him it wouldn’t hurt, and not to worry. My heart was melting.”

Can we cajole a mysteriously shuttered brain and body back toward normal? And if so, will autism give us new insight into other disorders? Martha Herbert thinks so: “A lot of these metabolic pathways are pretty fundamental to life. If we can crack the puzzle of autism and be clear about how we did it, that may have huge implications for other chronic environmentally triggered systemic illnesses. Autism could be a much-needed wake-up call to us all.”