I can't imagine the devastation parents must feel when their child is diagnosed as autistic. Ricardo Dolmetsch, PhD, assistant professor of neurobiology at Stanford, faced that reality with his oldest son. He and his spouse suspected that their son might be autistic when he was 18 months old. In a new 1:2:1 podcast, Dolmetsch told me that it was "the worst feeling in the world. You just don't know what you can do. I'm an academic so I went off and I looked at the literature. I was just horrified to discover that so little was known. So I thought, I'm a neurobiologist... so I decided to turn my lab towards studying autism."
Now, Dolmetsch is pioneering a wide range of research in autism. He states quite clearly that he knows, like any good scientist, that scientific inquiry leading to breakthroughs takes time. Yet he is an optimist. The dollars are now there to support research and "we are, for sure, moving in the right direction."
