Political Quotes

“I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I first learned about autism when I was a young staffer in the Pennsylvania State senate. A gentleman by the name of Dan Torisky came into our office one day. His son, Eddie, had autism, and he had asked us to see what we could do at the State level to give him and his family some help. Eddie was a young man at that time. He's an adult now. He's in his mid-forties. A lot of people's idea of autism I think was from the movie ``Rain Man.'' That was about the only thing they knew about autism. It was something that people didn't understand and something that was frequently misdiagnosed. When Chris and I decided to form this caucus over 10 years ago, one of the goals that we had was to bring education and awareness, not only to our colleagues, many of whom were not familiar with the disorder, but also to the public, and also to bring some attention to the researchers at NIH too, that there was something much bigger to this than people realized. It has borne fruit over the years. We've seen research dollars greatly increased at NIH. I want to also echo what my friend, Chris, said about the parents' groups. This is really the strength of the autism community. It's not the Autism Caucus. It's not Chris Smith or Mike Doyle. It's really the parents of these children that formed the many different groups you see out there.…”