JAD ABUMRAD: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. This hour our topic is diagnosis.

ROBERT: This next story begins with a dad, two sons, and a question: what do you do when you notice somebody's different? I heard it from reporter Gregory Warner.

BYRON FROWNER: Hello.

GREGORY WARNER: Hi.

BYRON FROWNER: Gregory?

GREGORY: I'm NPR's Gregory Warner.

BYRON FROWNER: Nice to meet you.

GREGORY: Nice to meet you.

GREGORY: Okay, just so you know it took me over a year ...

GREGORY: All right you can sit down and ...

GREGORY: ... to finally get an interview with Byron Frowner.

JAD: Yeah.

GREGORY: I'm wondering if the air conditioner ...

BYRON FROWNER: I can turn it off.

GREGORY: He's the dad in this story, and I'm up in his apartment in the South Bronx.

BYRON FROWNER: You'll have to excuse all this loose paperwork.

GREGORY: Are you moving out, or are you ...

BYRON FROWNER: No, it might look like that.

ROBERT: It was that messy?

BYRON FROWNER: I don't want to ...

GREGORY: Yeah.

GREGORY: No, that's good.

GREGORY: Boxes everywhere, crates, piles of stuff.

BYRON FROWNER: Oops. Okay.

GREGORY: Oh no, don't let go.

BYRON FROWNER: Don't worry about it.

GREGORY: Are you sure?

BYRON FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: I'm sorry.

BYRON FROWNER: I'll clean it up.

GREGORY: It's in disarray. There's ...

ROBERT: So who is this guy?

BYRON FROWNER: I'm a retired electrical engineer.

GREGORY: And he worked for the subway most of his life.

BYRON FROWNER: Now I consider myself a science researcher.

GREGORY: And at 71 years old, he's basically teaching himself ...

BYRON FROWNER: Quantum physics. That's what all the books and stuff you see around. I love that stuff.

GREGORY: And he's written this book called ...

BYRON FROWNER: Einstein's Error. Criticizing special relativity, Einstein. I sent it to the New York Academy of Scientists, Caltech, MIT, Harvard, Stephen Hawking. Still waiting for him to get back.

GREGORY: Most people just ignore him.

BYRON FROWNER: These are the ravings of a maniac.

GREGORY: But then he points to this letter on the wall from ...

BYRON FROWNER: Neil deGrasse Tyson.

GREGORY: I know that name.

GREGORY: This major scientist.

ROBERT: Yes. The head of the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan.

GREGORY: Exactly, yeah. And it says ...

BYRON FROWNER: "How dare you? You're just an engineer."

GREGORY: And he's beaming.

ROBERT: Why?

GREGORY: Why do you smile when you talk about that letter from Neil deGrasse Tyson?

BYRON FROWNER: Because I know how foolish it is. Einstein, they didn't even want to read his paper. They said, "Who is this guy—upstart? He's just a patent examination clerk in Bern."

GREGORY: Byron Frowner is a man who's proud to go against the grain.

BYRON FROWNER: I do the—what other people do I don't really do.

GREGORY: And that's especially true with how he raised his sons.

BYRON FROWNER: So now Gregory, you're going to do some kind of a story on Emanuel?

GREGORY: His youngest son.

GREGORY: Right.

GREGORY: Emanuel.

BYRON FROWNER: Okay.

GREGORY: And that's why I'm here.

GREGORY: Mostly focusing on ...

GREGORY: To question him about how he raised his son.

BYRON FROWNER: All right. I'd be glad to.

GREGORY: Okay, great.

GREGORY: So here's Emanuel.

EMANUEL FROWNER: Hi, I'm Emanuel Frowner.

GREGORY: Emanuel, could you take a drink of water for me?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Okay. Thank you.

GREGORY: No, don't thank me. Yeah, take as many drinks of water as you want.

GREGORY: He's 28.

GREGORY: So what things are you good at, Emanuel?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Writing essays, and making sure they are grammatically correct.

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

EMANUEL FROWNER: Bowling.

GREGORY: And as you can hear ...

EMANUEL FROWNER: Analyzing stuff

GREGORY: ... there is something going on with him.

EMANUEL FROWNER: And—and not talking that much, I guess.

GREGORY: Now, if you ask dad he'll say ...

BYRON FROWNER: Emanuel's an excellent student, our future Nobelist.

GREGORY: He's gonna win a Nobel Prize.

BYRON FROWNER: You never know.

GREGORY: But, if you ask Blair ...

BLAIR FROWNER: I'm Blair Frowner.

ROBERT: Who's that?

GREGORY: Emanuel's half brother.

BLAIR FROWNER: I'm about 20 years older than Emanuel.

GREGORY: He'll tell you that even as a little kid ...

BLAIR FROWNER: Very little.

GREGORY: Like five years old ...

BLAIR FROWNER: There was something odd, and I just didn't know what it was.

GREGORY: It was a bunch of little things.

BLAIR FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: Like he'd look at you really weird.

BLAIR FROWNER: Kind of like a doll face expression. He could stare at me without blinking for 15 minutes at a time. And I would notice, because you didn't blink once. Then there was the speech.

EMANUEL FROWNER: I did not talk as much as other people.

BLAIR FROWNER: There was something going on with Emanuel, but I did not have a word for it. And so I pushed several times to get speech therapy.

GREGORY: But every time he did, dad would just say ...

BYRON FROWNER: Are you kidding? He may have trouble stumbling and stammering but ...

BLAIR FROWNER: He'll grow out of it. I stuttered too. Blair. you also stuttered.

BYRON FROWNER: Einstein, he didn't speak a word 'til he was six. He was considered retarded in school.

BLAIR FROWNER: He would say that this was some temporary problem that would pass.

BYRON FROWNER: I didn't see anything that was screaming out for attention. He was doing his work. He was interested in the Knicks. We would go out endlessly in cold weather to the park, and it seemed like things were okay.

GREGORY: What about Emanuel?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well, I knew that I was a nicer person.

GREGORY: A nicer person?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Yeah, and that I was sensitive and I don't automatically look people in the eyes, the face and stuff.

GREGORY: So as long as Emanuel was a little kid this wasn't such a big deal, but then he got older.

BLAIR FROWNER: He was around 10 years old.

EMANUEL FROWNER: It was, I think, at the point where other people would point it out.

GREGORY: What did they say?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well, I have been called retarded and idiot savant, the N word and stuff.

BYRON FROWNER: They lost the innocence of the elementary school.

GREGORY: Emanuel would come home with bruises on his arms.

EMANUEL FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: Yeah.

BYRON FROWNER: It was something that I constantly thought about and worried about.

BLAIR FROWNER: I said, "Yeah, well it would be really good for him to get professional help with that."

GREGORY: But if you asked Dad he said the problem wasn't Emanuel.

BYRON FROWNER: No. It was all the other people.

GREGORY: The bullies.

BYRON FROWNER: The group. And this neighborhood, it was hard. There was fighting, constant fighting right down the street over here. People involved with crack. These are big guys, you know? I felt that it could have been a dangerous situation.

GREGORY: So his solution ...

BYRON FROWNER: I decided that I wanted to teach Emanuel home school.

GREGORY: ... was just to pull his son out of school.

EMANUEL FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: And how do you feel about this at the time?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well, I really didn't know.

BYRON FROWNER: Up here ...

GREGORY: So we're looking in a closet here.

BYRON FROWNER: I thought that whatever way he's kind of turned in ...

BYRON FROWNER: This is a binder from one of his classes.

BYRON FROWNER: ... that if he got bullied and tormented in going to school that it would turn him further in.

BYRON FROWNER: Let's see what this is.

BYRON FROWNER: But that if he were here he could develop along his own line 'til he became old enough that they wouldn't want to pick on him. Oh look what we turned to, Nature, Nurture.

GREGORY: It was a big deal for dad.

GREGORY: You hadn't home schooled anybody else before, right?

BYRON FROWNER: No, I had to get books. I had to go meet the principal.

GREGORY: He left his job, submitted a curriculum to the school.

BYRON FROWNER: And I had to register with the state of New York.

GREGORY: Created this syllabus for his son.

BYRON FROWNER: Grade 10, integrated math course.

GREGORY: And they would wake up each morning.

BYRON FROWNER: Rational numbers, geometry ...

GREGORY: Do their lessons.

BYRON FROWNER: ... isosceles triangle, equilateral triangle.

GREGORY: Have some lunch.

BYRON FROWNER: This is the work that he did at home.

GREGORY: And in the afternoon they'd go bowling.

ROBERT: Bowling?

GREGORY: Emanuel was an awesome bowler. His dad would videotape him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: Today is Tuesday, December ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: 28th.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: 28th. 1993.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Is it taping?]

GREGORY: It's weird footage. It's weird to watch because Emanuel's such an incredibly good bowler.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: Yeah, he took it out.]

GREGORY: But ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: Beautiful shot!]

GREGORY: ... he's always by himself. Tape after tape of nothing but Emanuel. Nobody else in the picture.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: Now listen ...]

EMANUEL FROWNER: I would fantasize about going on a tour and winning some titles and stuff.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: Beautiful!]

GREGORY: Did you think about joining any youth league or anything like that?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well I kind of—well, I vaguely thought about it, but for some reason my dad did not want me to.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Byron Frowner: I think you swung out. I think so.]

ROBERT: Meanwhile, his brother is just ...

GREGORY: Blair's in Canada.

ROBERT: At a distance.

GREGORY: Yeah. He followed a girl there. And one day he picks a book off the shelf.

BLAIR FROWNER: The DSM.

GREGORY: And the DSM is?

BLAIR FROWNER: The Diagnosis Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

GREGORY: Okay.

BLAIR FROWNER: And I started to do, I guess, what a lot of people would do who get a hold of this thing is to start diagnosing all of their friends. I diagnosed my girlfriend. I diagnosed my dad, and then I saw ...

GREGORY: Right there on the page ...

BLAIR FROWNER: Marks impairment in the use of multiple non-verbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze. Repetitive behavior patterns, problems seeking new friends, problems being able to understand what someone must be thinking. Problems. I went down this whole list, and everything seemed to fit. Marked impairments in eye-to-eye gaze.

GREGORY: The problem is every time he tried to call his dad ...

BLAIR FROWNER: Dad, what do you think?

GREGORY: His dad would say ...

BLAIR FROWNER: Just stop whining.

GREGORY: Go away.

BLAIR FROWNER: He'll just go through this.

GREGORY: And he shut him out.

BLAIR FROWNER: I mean, he basically cut communication.

BYRON FROWNER: I know my son.

EMANUEL FROWNER: He would always tell me that whatever I had would go away when I was an adult.

GREGORY: What does an adult mean? Does that mean 18?

EMANUEL FROWNER: 20 maybe. 20, lets say.

GREGORY: Okay. So you thought as soon as I reach the age of 20 then I won't have these problems?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: So did you wake up on your 20th birthday and think ...

EMANUEL FROWNER: I thought that maybe things would change right away, but they didn't.*

GREGORY: After that, Emanuel says he got really depressed. And that's how things might have stayed, until Dad has a heart attack. Blair comes to the hospital, finds Dad unconscious on the bed, and he realizes, "This is my big chance."

BLAIR FROWNER: Because he was not in a position to intervene.

GREGORY: And you're thinking ...?

BLAIR FROWNER: I'm thinking the first thing that's gonna happen is that we're gonna get a diagnosis because we had been waiting for it for so many years, or—26 older or whatever.

EMANUEL FROWNER: I think I was like 25, maybe.

BLAIR FROWNER: He's gonna get help, you know? He has to get help.

GREGORY: New Years Eve, 2005.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blair Frowner: All right, so where are we coming into now?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: We're at 42nd Street.]

GREGORY: Times Square.

BLAIR FROWNER: Times Square is one of Emanuel's favorite areas to hang out, and I figured I wanted it to be on his turf.

GREGORY: So they're outside, the crowd is just beginning to arrive.

BLAIR FROWNER: It was starting to snow a little bit.

EMANUEL FROWNER: And rain some too.

BLAIR FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: And Blair turns to Emanuel, and he says ...

BLAIR FROWNER: Have you ever heard of autism? I said, "I highly suspect that you have some form of autism, and I want us to find some way for you to get a diagnosis."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Ten, nine, eight ...]

BLAIR FROWNER: Oh, and I said ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Seven, six ...]

GREGORY: Don't breathe a word of this to dad.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Four, three, two, one! Happy new year!]

GREGORY: Doctor, how do I pronounce your name?

DOCTOR: Anagnostin.

GREGORY: And pretty soon after New Year's ...

GREGORY: And where are you from?

DOCTOR: I'm Greek.

GREGORY: ... Emanuel gets his diagnosis.

DOCTOR: It was right here on this couch. I did get a feeling from our beginning of the interaction that he was going to meet criteria for autism.

GREGORY: And a month later ...

EMANUEL FROWNER: She told me that I was on the autistic spectrum.

GREGORY: ... it was official.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Okay. Efumble ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doctor: Even more air.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Efumble.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doctor: Great, good.]

GREGORY: And so at the age of 26 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Assemble.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doctor: Mm-hmm.]

GREGORY: ... finally ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Audible.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doctor: More air.]

GREGORY: ... his life completely changed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Doctor: Audible.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Audible.]

GREGORY: So I gave him a tape recorder to record his life.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Hello, it's me Emanuel.]

GREGORY: He's meeting with a speech pathologist a couple of hours a week. Also, he's joined this program.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Adaptations.]

GREGORY: And started making friends.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: What do I say?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blair Frowner: Well, anything.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Hello. Hey Jason. Peace out.]

GREGORY: He got a girlfriend.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Hey, it's me Emanuel once again. And there's one lady that I haven't talked about yet named Norma. And we went to Central Park and we took pictures, and it was great.]

ROBERT: But wait a sec. I thought that people who were diagnosed with autism, the definition is they don't want to socialize.

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well, it's not because I don't want to, but it's just hard to do, you know?

GREGORY: But here's the thing about Emanuel. He says his whole new life? He hasn't told dad about any of it.

ROBERT: Not anything?

GREGORY: Not the girl, the friends, the diagnosis. His dad doesn't know anything is different.

GREGORY: So how long have you been keeping it a secret?

BLAIR FROWNER: It's been since 2005. right?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Yeah.

GREGORY: So basically for the last two years Emanuel's been leading this double life. Outside he's this person with autism, then he comes home, nothing's wrong.

GREGORY: Why?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well, I'm just afraid that Daddy won't really believe it.

GREGORY: But he knows he's gotta tell his dad who he really is.

EMANUEL FROWNER: Yes I do.

GREGORY: And he keeps saying he will.

EMANUEL FROWNER: I'm gonna say within a month.

GREGORY: Soon.

EMANUEL FROWNER: I'm not quite sure. I am a little bit nervous about telling him about my autism. Maybe within a few minutes or so. Let me tell him in like two weeks or so. Another day or so. I might tell him after I meet Blair. I'm gonna probably tell him—well, tomorrow. Maybe. I don't know yet. Maybe I'm just thinking about it a little bit too much, I don't know.

GREGORY: And then finally one night ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emanuel Frowner: Hi, it's me. I just want to say that I told my dad about my diagnosis.]

EMANUEL FROWNER: I said, "I really have something important to say, and don't get angry." And then I told him that I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. And he asked me what it was, and then I told him it is high-functioning autism.

BYRON FROWNER: I was shocked. That would be a good way to put it.

GREGORY: So do you think he has Asperger's?

BYRON FROWNER: Yes. Yes, I do. When I look at this syndrome for a lot—good parts of it's Emanuel, but I never at any point felt that Emanuel was in need of any deep psychological or psychiatric help.

GREGORY: But I mean, what makes you qualified to say that?

BYRON FROWNER: Just being a loving parent.

GREGORY: As I'm talking to him, we're sitting there on the couch. In front of us on the coffee table is all of Emanuel's notebooks from age five onward.

BYRON FROWNER: And they're really good stuff. I mean it's stuff that you and I would write.

GREGORY: And he saved it all. But the question that I feel like I gotta ask ...

GREGORY: Byron, I just have one more question on my list if I could ask you that one.

GREGORY: ... is now that you know that there is something wrong with your son, that there always was this disorder, that it's incurable, do you think you did the right thing?

GREGORY: Do you wish that he had gotten the diagnosis earlier?

BYRON FROWNER: No.

GREGORY: Why?

BYRON FROWNER: Because I think that he's better off at this point in time.

GREGORY: Why wouldn't it make a difference to know earlier why you're acting so strangely?

BYRON FROWNER: I didn't want Emanuel to get a diagnosis that would put him in a box, like a label.

GREGORY: And then Dad says to me, "Look, I mean if I had let the school give him some kind of diagnosis, they would have thrown him in special ed."

BYRON FROWNER: And say, "Oh, he's a retard. Look, he can't even talk."

GREGORY: "I mean, that would have destroyed him."

BYRON FROWNER: It would cause irreparable damage.

GREGORY: I asked the doctor, like, was there any truth to that?

GREGORY: If Emanuel was put into special ed hypothetically ...

DOCTOR: If he was in a District 75 class ...

GREGORY: The technical word for special ed.

DOCTOR: ... he would not have reached his academic potential. He is a graduate from St. John's with a degree in psychology. Kids who graduate District 75 don't do that.

GREGORY: Just to put that in perspective, Emanuel comes from a neighborhood where about 10 percent of the kids ever graduate college.

EMANUEL FROWNER: And my GPA was like 3.4 and change.

ROBERT: Wow!

GREGORY: And he's got Asperger's.

GREGORY: So now what? We're kind of in the opposite. We're vindicating what his father did, right?

DOCTOR: Well, in terms of his academic achievement, his father did the right thing. The problem with his dad's choice, and he had no way of knowing at the time, was the lack of peer groups, which he missed out on.

GREGORY: It seems like a cruel choice but ...

DOCTOR: Yeah, it's a cruel choice.

GREGORY: So if you were your father, and you were raising your kid at that time, would you have made the same choice he did?

EMANUEL FROWNER: Well, if I had known what I know now, then maybe I would have maybe begged him a little more for me to interact with others who were like I am, who are like I am.

ROBERT: That story from our correspondent Gregory Warner.

JAD: Greg's reporting was made possible in part by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Thanks to them, and thank you to Lulu Miller for producing that piece. We will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Bonnie calling from Boston, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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