Using new genetic screening technology, a few research groups are finding that a surprisingly large number of children with autism — at least five percent — have an underlying problem with their mitochondria, the energy factories of the cell.

National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins talks about the agency’s upcoming plans for “beefing up” autism research, including more than $100 million each year in grants for the field.

Following a series of papers in the past two years, what seems irrefutable is that copy number variations ― in which a particular stretch of DNA is either deleted or duplicated ― are important in autism.

Stylianos Antonarakis still vividly remembers the thorny statistical problem that had vexed him for several months in 1982. Antonarakis, then a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, had turned to his colleagues at Hopkins, but none of them had been able to solve the problem.