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Chuck Gardner will never forget what his good friend Rick Rollens told him after Gardner asked for advice about how to approach officials at the University of California, Davis, with his dream of creating a world-class research and treatment center for autism.

"You're wasting your time", Rollens said during that 1996 conversation. "It's never going to happen. I've worked with the UC system, and it will never happen in our lifetime. It takes them 10 years to decide whether to build a parking garage."

Both men, Gardner, who is a business owner in Sacramento, and Rollens, then secretary of the California Senate had young sons who have the often debilitating brain malady known as autism. The two men and their wives had been everywhere searching for help. They were long past desperate for something, anything, that could provide hope or relief.

It's a good thing Gardner didn't take Rollens pessimism to heart. He says now that he didn't know better at the time. That four years of sleepless nights while he and his wife, Sarah, kept constant vigil over their son, Chas, a handsome boy with no verbal skills but an uncanny ability to hurt himself and turn their household upside down, made him crazy enough to think even the impossible was possible.

With the help of another friend, Gardner got his meeting with officials at the UC Davis Medical Center, which is on the old State Fair grounds in Sacramento. Even though they established some ground rules that seemed impossible to meet, like "come see us again when you've raised $5 million in private funds", Gardner remained undeterred. As a result, the Medical Center campus today boasts what experts say is the leading autism research facility in the nation, if not the world.

It's housed in a gorgeous 100,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art building that cost $42 million to build and is designed so thoughtfully that The Wall Street Journal wrote a separate story about its architecture. It ran under the sub headline “Can a Building Help Cure a Disease?” Officially open since 2003, just seven years after Gardner and Rollens first talked about the pipe dream of an idea, the center boasts a full-time staff of 260 and has already conducted several groundbreaking research projects. The center's most recent undertaking: an ambitious autism study that is expected to radically change how the disease is diagnosed and treated. All because a small group of parents demanded action and took matters into their own hands when they weren't satisfied with what they were getting.

Read full story here: http://sar.c.topica.com/maaeK2eabqesKbpaTDfb/

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