On a recent Monday morning, 8-year-old Dov Shestack is off to Culver City, backpack full of snacks and a change of clothes.
After an hour of occupational therapy--swinging on swings, balancing on balls, writing the letters of his name in modeling clay--it's into the car again, down miles of clogged freeways to Encino, where he spends 1 1/2 hours putting together puzzles, learning and repeating the names of rabbits, numbers and other sundry objects.
On another day, it's Culver City for OT, then over to Canoga Park for speech therapy. There--with the help of much praise and many gummy worms--Dov is encouraged to move his tongue and lips into the right positions to say words such as "dog" and "car."
Dov, a dark-lashed boy with a quizzical expression, has autism. And his parents are trying everything they can to help make him better.
His mother, Portia Iversen, is even busier than Dov.
As she drives, she schedules plane flights on her headset and talks about the science of autism and the group, Cure Autism Now, that she and her husband, Jon Shestack, founded in 1995.
She looks tired, and no wonder: She was up all night reading requests from scientists for money for autism research.
Eight years ago, Iversen, an Emmy Award-winning art director, was a screenwriter working on the sitcom "Blossom." Shestack was a successful producer.
Everything changed in 1994 when they learned that their firstborn son had autism.
"I can remember nights, after he got the diagnosis, sitting by his crib having this realization over and over again . . . that he's in the grip of this terrible disease that is basically stealing away his mind," Iversen says. "It is the worst thing you can imagine."
Worse, still, was the discovery that Dov didn't respond very well to a mainstream autism therapy called "applied behavior analysis," and the realization that there wasn't much research going into either causes or therapies for autism. Iversen and Shestack started Cure Autism Now in an effort to change that.
While many autism groups focus on getting services for autistic kids, Cure Autism Now's focus is on improving the science.
Early on, the group commissioned a study that assessed the cost of autism as $13 billion annually in services and lost wages. (Estimates that include caring for adults run even higher, Shestack says.)
