The Glenn Gould of Radiology |
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Autistic radiologist who read double the scans as his peers was denied a diploma for lacking "social ability."
The accommodation he needed was one nurse to serve as an intermediary. It was never provided.
We consistently underestimate what autistic people can do while overestimating the obstacles.
A few years ago, I spoke with Laurent Mottron, the University of Montreal neuroscientist who has spent more than 30 years researching autistic cognition. He has assessed over 3,000 autistic individuals and published more than 400 papers. Mottron is not sentimental. So when he said he had a "tragic story," I listened.
He told me about a man, who I'll call B, who had completed nearly all the requirements for a radiology specialization at the University of Montreal. This man was the best student in his class. He had spent fifteen years training. He could read twice as many radiological scans as a non-autistic colleague. He was also a professional-level guitarist. Mottron called him "the Glenn Gould of radiology," Glenn Gould being a brilliant, classical pianist.
B was refused his diploma. The reason: he didn't talk to people. He wore identical shirts every day. The university said he lacked "the social ability to work in a team." Mottron lobbied on his behalf, but radiologists are MDs with institutional power, and they closed ranks.
What would it have taken? One nurse. A single person to serve as an intermediary between the radiologist and the staff requesting his reads. Give him the scans, let him work on his own, have someone else handle the communication. This man could have run the entire radiology department of a hospital by himself.
When the man learned he had been refused, he wrote that he was going to set himself on fire in front of the University of Montreal. He didn't do it. But it was that close. Fifteen years of training, the best student in his class, and the system could not figure out how to let him do the one thing he was better at than almost anyone.
Instead, they tried to find him another specialty, something less prestigious where his differences might be tolerated.
This is what Mottron has been arguing for decades: We underestimate what autistic people can do while overestimating the obstacles to letting them do it. An autistic person might struggle to organize time around a deadline, but outperform everyone in the room at problem-solving if given enough of it. We see the deficit and build a system around it. We rarely see the ability and build a system around that.
In December 2025, Mottron published a paper titled "Autism-ness Does Not Exist, but Autism Does." The argument is that autism is not a sliding scale of traits distributed across the general population. It is a distinct developmental variant—like being left-handed. It's not a disease, a disorder in varying degrees of severity, or a different organization of the brain that belongs to the human species' range of possibilities.
This matters because the spectrum model has consequences. If autism is just the extreme end of a continuum, then accommodations become optional—nice to have, not structurally necessary. If autism is a qualitatively different way of being, then failing to accommodate it is a categorical failure. The radiologist did not need to become less autistic. He needed one nurse.
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When I asked Mottron whether autistic people could be incorporated into society in ways that let them contribute, he reframed the question: "How can we manage so that the largest amount of autistics can give back to society?" His answer was that we had to find a solution for each autistic individual. Global ideologies didn't cut it.
My son's Dutch school predicted he was only capable of "non-wage-earning day activities." He now holds a paid job in New Jersey. The Dutch system built a structure around his deficits. The American system asked what he actually needed. Unfortunately, the radiologist never got that question.