Week8, James Watson and DNA and the Brain

I found this lecture by James Watson interesting because he addressed
the rising issue of autism in recent years. He stated that children
who have autism " don't have any social interraction with people, have
low IQ and repetitive behavior and is a great burden for families that
have to care for an autism child." Autism is more common in boys than
girls and this may be due to the X chromosome or Y chromosome having
some kind of defect. I found it interesting to hear that if both
parents are missing in empathy, they are more likely to have a child
with autism. I find that difficult but I guess it would be a solid
argument especially if the parents have genes that are some what
similar especially when dealing with human behavior. Recently I have
been seeing an increase of attention in autism in the media and I'm
wondering if this is due to an increase of reported incidents or is it
because there are other factors rather than genes that are making these
numbers go up. I had heard that vaccines are in part at fault for the
rise of autism children. Is that true? Does autism affect any ethnicity
and any age in boys? I definitely will look into this topic more in
debt because it does bring some concern.

James Watson states that "refining the phenotype can vary from a life
course of a lifetime." He also thinks that human behavior is influenced
by environment. I thought he was funny, but a bit unclear when he was
asked questions towards the end of his lecture. Overall I enjoyed
viewing him because he seemed to be such a content individual.