The narrower we define autism, and the more strictly we control for particular behaviors, the more likely we are to find what I think are the subgroups of autism.

To some extent, we all have quirks or idiosyncrasies, and some geniuses, because of how bright they are and how focused they are, may have liberal eccentricities, but they're not at a disabling level.

There is such a thing as genius, and these are people who do not have a formal disability, DSM-IV-type. They may have liberal eccentricities or quirks in their personality, but they don't rise to the level of a disability.

I think that if I could do any sort of research of autism that I wanted to do, at this point I would take a sample of classic, early infantile autism persons and compare them with what I call "classic late onset autism", individuals. I think we will find that the cause of those youngsters with autism who have autism from birth is probably different than those who have late onset autism.

Sometimes along the way, when people are actively working, they will start to do a search for their roots and maybe get really interested in ancestry and become very good at what was just a hobby. But I think that we shouldn't wait quite that long to develop and look for those parallel interests of ours and not sometimes see them as frivolous and take them a little more seriously, and spend some time and energy and maybe even capital in pursuing them.

Originally when we talked about language disorder it was a catastrophic language disorder. It's substantial, and from a treatment standpoint it's okay to keep diluting that term, but from a research standpoint we need to be much more precise. I wish somebody would take up the mantle of just that particular task.

There does seem to be a higher educational level in parents of autistic youngsters, and I guess that's something that we need to look into.