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Here's an example of the stupid shit that gets research funding while the obvious avenues go unexplored.
I received an invitation today to participate in a study. They want to know if I have any home video footage of my autistic children, under the age of six months, that happens to show them crying or fussing. Because they're going to get a bunch of people in a room and see if they can isolate a difference in the sound of the cries of future-autistic babies and ones that turned out normal.
Let's even pretend for a moment that it's not stupid on its face. Say they do happen to find some completely unexpected, subtle difference in these babies' cries. This information will be diagnostically useless. How do you train every pediatrician in the country to discern the auditory difference? If your pediatrician is tone deaf, are they no longer qualified to be a pediatrician? Maybe it will become standard practice to record 5-10 seconds of crying at every baby's 4-month checkup, and then we can just send the millions of mp3s over to India for faster processing?
They're running out of ways to try and prove the autism was always secretly there from the beginning, and this is apparently what they have left to spend their money on.
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