so, is autism environmental then?

well, you're blurring the question.

but, we're more likely to get autism rates down by addressing air pollution than we are in solving this via gene editing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737505/

i'll take a step back - is it possible to go at this from the whole "personalized medicine" slant? well, if you can determine that a specific individual is displaying autistic spectrum behaviour because they lack the ability to properly regulate a specific hormone because of a broken genome, then you could in theory develop drugs that get into the dna and correct for it. ok.

but, due to the randomness of the condition, this would only work for one person at a time and you really wouldn't be able to take that medicine and apply it to anybody else unless they have exactly the same mutation, independently - a potentiality so rare as to be discarded.

so, every single autistic person would need personalized drugs designed specifically for only them.

further, if you can understand the delivery mechanism well enough to know the hormone the person needs, it would certainly make more sense to just inject them with the hormone, so long as you can get through the blood-brain barrier (a problem, regardless). and, for some people that develop autistic spectrum behaviour, it may be as simple as just pumping them up with a neuro-transmitter or other hormone that undoes the broken genome. but, due to the compounding nature of the disease, that is probably too simple of a concept to take seriously - i mean, it would only be the very lucky ones where this is actually a cure. if you pump a 35 year-old autistic person up with choline or something then you might give them the opportunity to think more clearly, but you're not undoing 35 years of choline-deficiency and the compounding effect it's had. the result of waking up at 35 to the reality that you're autistic may actually be worse than not really knowing it. you'd have to start off by treating them like toddlers, and watch them go through adolescence in their 40s and 50s; they'll probably actually learn slower at that age, as kids learn way faster. so, you'd have to figure that out essentially immediately, and start them on hormone treatment for their entire lives.

is that a cure? it's a treatment, i'll give you that. but, why bother with the genetics, then? why not just start injecting neurotransmitters into autistic people and see what happens?

autism rates have gone up dramatically, and you can only assign so much of that to overdiagnosis. it's just a hunch, but it's an educated one, and i really think that getting the pollution down is going to have a much bigger effect on reducing the actual effects of autism than anything we can do with personalized medicine, to offset or mitigate it.

to put it another way: it's a band-aid. i want to get to root causes, and that would appear to be pollution-related...