People tell me that research in Autism has yielded few fruits or treatments to improve quality of life for those severely affected. They feel betrayed perhaps b

People tell me that research in Autism has yielded few fruits or treatments to improve quality of life for those severely affected. They feel betrayed perhaps because the complexity of the causes and phenotyping of autism has turned out to be much more complex than realized 15 years ago. I bring this up because people felt the same way about cancer. For decades and decades, there were glimmers of false hope, claims that a cure for cancer was just a few years away, surely solved in the next decade, and time after time they were proven wrong. People felt betrayed perhaps because the complexity of cancer made the problem so very difficult to solve. And YET: Here we are. Real, tangible progress. The hard problems take huge efforts over many years, but we are solving them. If we put the effort and funding and time into understanding autism, other neurodevelopmental disorders, depression, longetivity, and so on, we will prevail.