title: Autism research: lessons from the past and prospects for the future.
abstract: The paper uses both the author's experience of research training, and the empirical studies of autism in which he participated over the last 40-plus years, to derive research lessons and to consider the needs and prospects for future research. Attention is drawn to: the importance of mentors; the need to use technologies in a hypothesis-testing fashion; the important of possible creative/innovative leaps and of recognition of the unexpected; the need to ask challenging questions and to recognize when the original ideas were mistaken. There is great value in broadening the scientific strategies used to investigate a particular condition and much is to be gained by deliberately seeking parallels with other conditions.
authors.affiliation: SGDP Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Box P080, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London, SE5 8AF, UK. j.wickham@iop.kcl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rutter
mesh_terms: D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology; D009042:Motivation; D015995:Prevalence