Will Autism Study Devastate "Trophy Wife" Industry?

 

A lively discussion on the new autism study in Nature, linking the disorder to older fathers erupted in the comments section of the Wall Street Journal. The level of skepticism among responders puzzled me at first. But then I remembered a devilish little concept called "trophy wives." You know, the young and attractive women that older men marry as a status symbol after walking out on the exhausted wife from the first marriage who sacrificed to put him through Business School. And bytheway, in breaking up the marriage, this  guy is also abandoning physically healthy children who are now emotionally bruised by divorce.  

No wonder some readers found this research distasteful, in asserting that the sperm of older men have a greater number of mutations, which lead to autism and other brain disorders.   What’s the point of having a trophy wife, and a young new familly if she and you both have to spend your yacht-time catering to the special needs of an autistic child.

The researchers' genetic findings appear far more sound than previous theories that blamed the problem on childhood vaccinations. The misunderstanding may have arisen because a child's autistic symptoms begin to express themselves at the same age as certain vaccinations that are recommended for kids.

My Questions

But I must admit to having a few of my own questions about the study. If working on autism is such a priority in this United States, why do researchers have to go all the way to Iceland and study a population that is genetically remote from most Americans?

There's something else about this study that I find down right annoying. How much would it have cost for these or another group of autism reseachers to, for verification purposes, have put together a list of autistic children in the U.S. alongside information about each father's age at the time the child was conceived? Those findings supported by the recently published genetic study would give us a clear-cut answer to the etiology of this disorder.

Or maybe that's the problem. If finding the answer to a serious medical question costs $1500 rather than $15 million, laboratories and research facilities have no incentive to conduct the study. Of course I could devote a weekend or two to gathering the information myself. But being a historian rather than a medical researcher, my findings would not get published in any peer-reviewed medical journals. In short, no one would see the results of the study except you loyal few who read this blog.  However. . . at the prodding of one of my students,  I'll get to work on this little project anyway and report back to you with the findings in several weeks.

If anyone has an answer to these  questions, please help me out here.