Cure to Autism and Alzheimer's May Be in Space

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I say unlikely but good luck to him regardless

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internaci ... -iss.shtml

Curing Alzheimer's is definitely a worthwhile goal and probably will be possible eventually.

Curing autism is going to be dicey at best just due to how much of the brain is impacted and that there's a much larger number of people who don't need a cure than is currently known. I'd be very curious to hear how they'd propose to cure autism without curing the people who wouldn't want to be cured, as it would require intervening early on while the brain is in the early stages of developing.

Past a certain point, a cure would result in turning somebody into somebody that they're not. In which case, you're making decisions for other people based on your personal beliefs and humans don't have the greatest track record in doing so.

I don’t believe the cure is in space it was just an eye catching headline.

Some autisms will be cured in the future others will likely be just prevented.

There is no proof that curing autism changes the person to the point they are no longer the same person.

It’s a common straw man position used in the community.

Anyway for those with profound autism who cares anyway.

I'd go for it if the cure cures executive dysfunction symptoms in any way or form.

It's not at all a straw man, you're arguing that something that impacts significant portions of the brain at a developmental level can be changed without also changing everything that runs on top of it? That's a rather bold claim to make and not likely to be what happens. Even most personality disorders, which typically run at a higher level, can't be changed significantly without changing who the person is. That's assuming that it's even one of the few identify personality disorders that can be changed. I fail to see how such recklessness really serves anybody.

You can't know ahead of time what impacts having autism will have far enough ahead to know if a cure would be the appropriate course of action. There's a very long history of humans abusing eugenics in ways that cause problems. I fail to see why this would be any different. I'm sure if you asked the various people and organizations engaged in it at the time, they wouldn't have seen anything wrong with it. Eventually it got to the point of the Nazis and the holocaust. I don't think that it would get that bad because we now have a sense of what can happen without any guardrails, but it doesn't need to be that bad to have serious consequences for everybody. It's not like psychiatry and psychology, where the person being treated gets to give informed consent and most of the treatment can be undone if necessary.

There's also the pesky question of whether humans can even know how to redesign the brain in a way that doesn't just cause other problems and further stifle evolution.

That's kind of interesting. This is a lot more grey area in terms of whether it could be done at all and what the consequences of it would be. I suspect that you wouldn't really see much out of that which couldn't be done with technology that is currently, or likely to be available soon, on the market. I've got a machine learning program on my computer that can dig through all my books and find information related to my question. Or even generate a proposed solution. Something similar for most executive functioning challenges is a lot easier than trying to actually cure any of it.