As World Autism Awareness Week starts today, we at KOKO will be looking and celebrating  some of the famous and ordinary people who have the condition. Today marks the start of World Autism Awareness Week, to celebrate the lives of people living with autism.
Autism-friendly events and educational activities will be held throughout the week and thousands of landmarks, buildings, homes and communities around the world will be lit light blue tomorrow in recognition of people living with autism.We look over a few other stars who have the condition…
1. Steve Jobs:Â The former CEO of Apple, who died in 2011, is believed to have had autism due to behavioral quirks such as his perfectionism and unorthodox ways of thinking. The tech genius had a very high IQ, but often struggled with social interaction.
2. Albert Einstein:Â Albert Einstein is another genius who was posthumously diagnosed with symptoms of austism. Researchers at Cambridge University think he may have had Asperger’s: as a child the physicist was a loner, he struggled to engage in small talk and displayed obsessive characteristics, such as repeating sentences.
3. Isaac Newton:Â The same researchers found that the English mastermind may also have suffered from Asperger’s, a form of the condition that does not cause learning difficulties. Newton struggled to communicate, was sometimes so engrossed in his work that he often forgot to eat, and would give lectures to an empty room if no-one turned up.
4. Charles Darwin:Â Leading psychiatrists believe that Charles Darwin had autism because of his great attention to detail and his difficulties with social interactions.
5. Bill Gates: It’s been thought by a number experts that the famously socially awkward Bill Gates may be autistic. Author Steve Silberman, while researching autism in Silicon Valley, received a call from a supervisor at Microsoft who told him: “All of my top debuggers have Asperger’s syndrome. They can hold hundreds of lines of code in their head as a visual image. They look for the flaws in the pattern, and that’s where the bugs are.
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