I don't know of any neuropsychiatric disorder other than an infection that has been cured. But the goal is to improve the quality of life of people who experience autistic symptomology and I just think we will make progress on that.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot account for the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 million cells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life.

I don't know of any neuropsychiatric disorder other than an infection that has been cured. But the goal is to improve the quality of life of people who experience autistic symptomology and I just think we will make progress on that.

As the diagnosis of autism is increasing the diagnosis of mental retardation is decreasing. And more and more on the other end, the high end, more children who are just a little bit off, who ordinarily you would not single out now are being described as perhaps Asperger’s syndrome or on the high end of the autism spectrum, so I don’t believe there is an epidemic.

I think the gold standard is a clinical diagnosis, that an astute clinician interacting with a child, interviewing the parents, talking with teachers makes the diagnosis based on some standard tests and also on clinical impression and skill.

It is not all that common, but there is a phenomenon where autism could get worse at about age two. There are some controversies whether regression is a prominent part of autism, but many people feel that it's very hard to diagnose autism before you can begin really talking in detail with a child.

In autism there is just genes in part more or less of a probability that you will have the disorder, and that is where interactions with the environment are key.