Uta Frith seems remarkably cheerful and content for someone who's spent six decades trying and failing to get to grips with her life's obsession. "Very little has stood the test of time," she tells me as we sit down in her living room in a leafy estate in Harrow-on-the-Hill, London. Around us, high-ceilinged walls papered in a luxurious red print are barely visible between rammed bookshelves, several model brains and a collection of abstract art. Frith has been searching for the mechanisms that underpin the enigmatic condition of autism ever since she first met profoundly autistic children in the late 1960s. "We could identify them intuitively, but not really scientifically - and I have to say that this is, unfortunately, still the case." Still, Frith's influence on our ever-shifting understanding of autism has been monumental.

Uta Frith doesn't want to meet Donald Trump. "There would be no point in my saying anything to him," she says. "Mostly, when scientists give advice to politicians, politicians listen only to the things they want to hear." Frith, a developmental psychologist who works at University College London, should know. Not only has she been a pioneer in the study of dyslexia and autism -- in the 1960s, she was one of the first researchers in the UK to study Asperger's Syndrome -- but she has also been working to advance the interests of women in science for decades.

A machine-learning algorithm has analysed brain scans of 6-month-old children and predicted with near-certainty whether they will show signs of autism when they reach the age of 2. The finding means we may soon be able to intervene before symptoms appear, although whether that would be desirable is a controversial issue. "We have been trying to identify autism as early as possible, most importantly before the actual behavioural symptoms of autism appear," says team member Robert Emerson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previous work has identified that bundles of nerve fibres in the brain develop differently in infants with older siblings with autism from how they do in infants without this familial risk factor. The changes in these white matter tracts in the brain are visible at 6 months. For the new study, Emerson and his team did fMRI brain scans of 59 sleeping infants, all of whom were aged 6 months and had older siblings with autism, which means they are more likely to develop autism themselves. The scans collected data from 230 brain regions, showing the 26,335 connections between them.