Casual viewers may have noticed Mitnick's mannerisms -- a twitchy lack of poise, inability to look people in the eye, stunted formality in diction and obsessive interest in technology -- but Grandin saw something else: possible signs of Asperger syndrome, or . . .
Casual viewers may have noticed Mitnick's mannerisms -- a twitchy lack of poise, inability to look people in the eye, stunted formality in diction and obsessive interest in technology -- but Grandin saw something else: possible signs of Asperger syndrome, or AS.

Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University and an internationally respected authority on the meat industry, is perhaps the world's best-known sufferer of AS. She recognized those traits and others exhibited by Mitnick as typical of the syndrome, a recently identified disorder closely associated with autism.

Grandin, Mitnick and several leading medical researchers say there is sufficient evidence to ask: Could AS be an indicator of children at risk of drifting into computer hacking?

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