At the age of two, Jacob Barnett was told he had autism. Doctors told his mother, Christine Barnett, that he had a severe case and that it would take a lot of work for him to understand at least the basics and learn basic life skills.
People said that he probably couldn’t even tie his own shoes. The mother did listen to the advice of experts, and she even sent Jacob to a special school, but he got worse. The boy spent less and less time with other people and talked less and less.
Yes, it was hard for Christine to make this choice, but she is strong, so she decided to pull her son out of the state program and teach him on her own.
And now, her son is making progress. A woman who was afraid and didn’t know what to do taught him as best she could on her own.
His intellectual growth and desire to learn turned out to be so strong that he grew up very quickly and was much smarter than his peers. Einstein was 170 points smarter than he was, according to an IQ test (the great scientist had an IQ of 165).
At age 11, Jacob went to Indiana University and chose physics as his major. He is the youngest astrophysicist who gives talks at conferences right now. His teachers have said that he knows a lot about a lot of things. People say that the theory he is working on is about some of the hardest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics. People think that Jacob will win the Nobel Prize.
This story shows once again that doctors’ diagnoses are just that—diagnoses. They don’t mean anything, especially when it comes to something as complicated as autism.