“We are all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”                                                Chuck Swindoll

October 2000 – Indianapolis, Indiana: Kristine and Michael Barnett sat nervously waiting for the behavioral therapist. They hoped to finally get a diagnosis about their two-year-old son Jake’s illness. He had been a bright, happy baby; before he was a year old, he could recite his ABCs forward and backward. Then, at 15 months, he stopped talking or responding to his name and began to withdraw from their touch. Now Jake just stared for hours, fascinated with shadows, lights, and the stars.

“Mr. and Mrs. Barnett,” the therapist began, “I will get right to the point. Your son is severely autistic. He will probably never talk, read, or even tie his shoes.” It was a devastating diagnosis.

The state of Indiana assigned a team of three therapists to come to the Barnett house five days a week to work with Kristine on Jake’s speech and motor skills. During the day, Kristine divided her time between Jake’s therapy sessions and the daycare she operated in the family’s garage. At night, she cried in the shower.

Jake was frustrated by the therapy sessions, which forced him to try things he could not do. Kristine noticed that Jake would play for hours after the therapists left. One afternoon in the daycare, Jake took hundreds of crayons and made a perfect rainbow in the precise order of the color spectrum. Kristine wondered how he knew to do that.

Later, while they were in a music store, Jake, who had never seen a piano keyboard, sat down and played the song he heard on the store’s intercom. Although he was not communicating verbally with others, Kristine realized her little boy had an extraordinary mind.

She began focusing on things Jake liked to do. He could put together a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle in a few hours. They spent hours looking at the night sky, and because he was fascinated with the stars, Kristine bought him a book on astronomy. By age 3, Jake had memorized the 85 constellations in the Milky Way Galaxy and could point them out in the book.

Kristine took Jake to a Butler University astronomy lecture, and the three-year-old awed the crowd when he answered a question about why the two moons of Mars aren’t round. Astronomy and the stars became the bridge Kristine used to gradually reach Jake, but progress was frustratingly slow. He rarely spoke, and the night he hugged her and said, “Night, Night,” she was so encouraged that she stayed up most of the night.

When Jake started preschool, he was assigned to a special education class because of his poor communication and social skills. When the teacher told Kristine that he would never learn to read, she pulled him out of school over the strong objections of his therapist. She knew Jake would never reach his potential with a traditional approach to autism, so Kristine continued to focus on things he enjoyed doing.

By first grade, Jake was mainstreamed into regular classes. When he completed the year of math assignments in a week, his teacher gave him the high school GED book to read. Jake got a perfect score in the math section. When he was in third grade, Kristine received permission from Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), to allow Jake, with her assistance, to audit their five astronomy courses. He astounded the professors with his knowledge of the solar system.

At age 10, Jake took an IQ test. He scored 170 on a scale where genius begins at 150. His math and physics scores weren’t measurable; no one had ever tested that high. Jake received a scholarship to IUPUI the following year and began taking master’s and doctoral-level courses in math, physics, and astrophysics.

At age 15, Jake completed the course work at IUPUI and was accepted at the prestigious Perimeter Institute in Advanced Physics, the world’s No. 2 institution for theoretical physics, in Toronto, Canada. The Barnett’s moved to there so Jake could attend classes.

Today, the 28-year-old prodigy is one of the leading astrophysicists at the Perimeter Institute. Physicists believe Jake’s current research on how light travels through space may expand upon Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and lead to a Nobel Prize.

The experts diagnosed Jake Barnett’s situation as hopeless, but Kristine refused to give up on him. A mother’s tenacious fight to reach her autistic son may end up leading to scientific breakthroughs that will benefit all of mankind.