It was the spring of 2005, and some of the rhesus monkeys at the California National Primate Research Center were behaving oddly. Specifically, they were climbing to the top of their chain-linked cages and flipping over backwards, over and over. Others were pacing frantically back and forth inside the cages, or spinning around like children trying to get dizzy.
While this behavior might seem normal for zoo monkeys, it's rarely seen at a primate center, which has an environment that closely resembles monkeys' natural habitat. It told the researchers working there that an unlikely hypothesis about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might actually be correct.
The idea for the experiment came from work by Judy Van de Water at the University of California, Davis, who had been running experiments on mothers of children with ASD ("ASD mothers"). In 2003 her group found that a subset of ASD mothers shared similar antibodies. ...
