Last week, President Obama paid a visit to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where he announced $5 billion in grants to fund new explorations of long-time biomedical research targets from cancer to heart disease. The grants also include the largest-ever investment in an area that the President has made a focus from the first days of his presidency—autism research. Altogether, the federal government will provide nearly twice as much funding for autism research in the upcoming fiscal year as they did just three years ago. And it appears this increased funding couldn’t have come at a better time, especially in light of a new government study that suggests autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have nearly doubled since the last survey conducted in 2003.
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