Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is the scientist Ute Frith. A developmental psychologist,

her groundbreaking work on autism has revolutionized our understanding of the condition, overturning the traditional

long-held belief that the root of the problems are social and emotional, discovering instead

that autism is the result of physical differences in the brain.

She arrived in Britain from Germany in the early 60s for a two-week course in English,

half a century later, and groaning under the weight of Myriad fellowships and awards with an honorary DBE to her name,

she is one of the grand dams of British science.

In retirement, she continues to mentor and encourage fellow women scientists,

not least in her networking group, science and shopping.

A name being to, yes, think, but also to have some fun.

She says her metaphor for the brain is that of a

garden that's full of the most interesting different things that have to be

cultivated and constantly checked. So Utifrit, at the heart of your work then is

the central issue of the difference in how each of us sees the world. Is that right?

That's a very nice way of putting it. We learn by taking different perspectives

something about ourselves which we otherwise would never have known. So this is

the really amazing thing about studying autism that you do find that there is a different mind with different strengths, different weaknesses.

And that is why your analogy of the garden is so

brilliant it gets right to the heart of it because of course we all have the ability

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