Washington ? Harvard researchers have discovered half a dozen new genes involved in autism that suggest the disorder strikes in a brain that can’t properly form new connections.

The findings also may help explain why intense education programs do help some autistic children – because certain genes that respond to experience weren’t missing, they were just stuck in the “off” position.

“The circuits are there but you have to give it an extra push,” said Dr. Gary Goldstein of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, which wasn’t involved in the gene hunt but is well-known for its autism behavioral therapy.

But the study’s bigger message is that autism is too strikingly individual to envision an easy gene test for it. Instead, patients are turning out to have a wide variety, almost a custom set, of gene defects.

“Almost every kid with autism has their own particular cause of it,” said Dr. Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics at Children’s Hospital Boston, who led the research published in today’s edition of the journal Science.