These are big questions, so I'm going to shut up now and begin my conversation with Dr. Geschwind by first asking him to talk a little bit about his history in autism research, some of his major research discoveries, and how it has added to the understanding of autism, just to get to know you a little bit better.

Thanks so much, Alicia, and thanks for this great opportunity to try to explain what we're doing with my colleagues at UCLA, of course.

You know, uh, when I got involved in autism research, it was a very, very small field from the perspective of funding.

There was approximately six million dollars a year of autism funding.

And I met a couple, John Chestak and Portia Iverson, who had started a foundation called Cure Autism Now, with the idea that they really needed to bring public awareness to autism and to fund research to move the field forward and to lobby, obviously, the government to fund more because the cost of the disorder far outweighed what was being put into it.

So I got involved with that, and I really hadn't known much about autism, although my research and my interests and my training was both as a, as a neurologist and as a developmental neurobiologist.

So I wasn't formally trained as a geneticist, but we were using a lot of thinking about genomic methods.

Mm-hmm.