Mark Bear, 53, has been fixated on understanding the brain since he was 6-when he saw news commentators speculating about John F. Kennedy's brain functioning after the shooting. He later became a neu-roscientist, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spending most of his career doing basic research on how the brain's cells form connections during learning.Today researchers are buzzing about Bear and his radical new theory that offers a real glimmer of hope that some forms of autism may be treatable with drugs. The causes of autism have mystified scientists for decades. It has been blamed on everything from genes to environmental toxins to the discredited concept that childhood vaccines are the culprit.
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