if you got them going they could talk unendingly about their stamp collection, haydn, moztar, beethoven, viennese modernist artists. get them going and they could talk forever. in fact one of these who came to his clinic went on to win the nobel prize in literature she was so talented. so people with autism can have a wide spectrum of capabilities. some from having language disorder, some from being able to use language in a creative way. for a number of years people thought that asperger's, that these highly well-functioning individuals formed a very special category called the asperger's syndrome and we'll have more of a discussion about this as we go on but that this is part of a spectrum and you can't subdivide any particular points this all an autism spectrum disorder. jerry fischbach, who's really a profound student of the biology of autism and social implications is going to describe what we understand about the syndrome and also its biological underpinnings. allison singer is going to give us an inside view of autism. she has a beautiful daughter that suffers from autism and she