Ultimately, she adopted the term autism spectrum. She liked the sound of it, which evoked pleasing images of rainbows and other phenomena that attest to the infinitely various creativity of nature. Clinicians readily adopted the phrase, because it helped explain what they’d been seeing in the real world for decades. It was a meme destined to go viral, so to speak—with assistance from a collusion of cultural forces that Lorna could not have foreseen, including a film that would turn Kanner’s formerly obscure disorder into a household word virtually overnight.
