In the fall of 1979, after three months of living with a French family in the Loire Valley, 19-year-old Daniel Geschwind decided not to return to his undergraduate studies in chemistry at Dartmouth College. Instead, he stayed in France for a year, filming, producing, editing and starring in a series of professional ski movies. "I was curious about filmmaking at the time," he recalls matter-of-factly. "And it was really a lot of fun."Over the following 25 years, Geschwind continued to follow his bliss, building an unconventional, but thoroughly successful, career. When, at age 23, he finally finished his chemistry degree, he took a detour into business consulting before beginning an M.D./Ph.D. program focused on neurobiology. In the late 1990s, after he had established himself as an expert on the genetics of neurological diseases, a personal connection abruptly pulled him into autism research.Since then, Geschwind has participated in dozens of studies probing the genetic basis of autism and related neuro-developmental disorders. In August 2001, he and other researchers affiliated with the Cure Autism Now nonprofit created the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) ― a gene bank of more than 4,500 samples from children with autism and their families. Using samples collected through AGRE, Geschwind has led many of the largest high-resolution genome scans intended to pinpoint the chromosomal defects in people with autism.Read more at...SFARI, February 2009.