Temple Grandin<\/h3>
Mary Temple Grandin (Born August 29, 1947) is an American professor of animal science at Colorado State University, consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior, and autism spokesperson. She is one of the first individuals on the autism spectrum to publicly share insights from her personal experience of autism. She invented the \"Hug Box\" device to calm those on the autism spectrum. In the 2010 Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, she was named in the \"Heroes\" category.[2] She was the subject of the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning semi-biographical film Temple Grandin.\n<\/p>
Mary Temple Grandin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a very wealthy family. One of the Irish girls who worked for the family was also named Mary, so Grandin was referred to by her middle name, Temple, to avoid confusion.[3] Her mother is Anna Eustacia Purves (now Cutler), an actress, singer and granddaughter of the co-inventor for the autopilot aviation system (John Coleman Purves),[4] with a degree in English from Harvard University. Her father was Richard McCurdy Grandin,[5][6] a real estate agent and heir to the largest corporate wheat farm business in America at the time, Grandin Farms.[7] Grandin's parents divorced when she was 15, and her mother eventually went on to marry Ben Cutler, a renowned New York saxophonist, in 1965[8] (when Grandin was 18 years old). Her father Richard died in California in 1993. Grandin is the eldest of four children and has three younger siblings: two sisters and a brother. Grandin has described one of her sisters as being dyslexic. Her younger sister is an artist, her other sister a sculptor, and her brother a banker.[7][9]John Livingston Grandin (Temple's paternal great-grandfather) and his brother William James Grandin, were French Huguenots who drilled for oil, intending to cut a deal with John D. Rockefeller, but the latter kept him waiting too long so he walked out before Rockefeller arrived. Then they went into banking and when Jay Cooke's firm collapsed they got thousands of acres of undeveloped land in North Dakota as collateral. They set up wheat farming in the Red River Valley with dormitories for the workers; the town of Grandin, North Dakota, is named after John Livingston Grandin.[4][10] Although raised in the Episcopal religion, Temple Grandin early on gave up on a belief in a personal deity or intention in favor of what she considers a more scientific idea of God.[11]<\/p>
Contrary to widely published reports, Grandin was never formally diagnosed with autism in childhood or in youth. The only formal diagnosis received by Grandin was of 'brain damage' at the age of 2,[12][13] a finding corroborated subsequently when she was 64 years old, by cerebral imaging carried out in 2010 at the University of Utah.[14] When Grandin was in her mid-teens, her mother chanced upon a checklist on autism published by Dr. Bernard Rimland, a renowned American psychologist and founder of the Autism Research Institute. Completing the checklist, Grandin's mother hypothesised that Grandin's symptoms were best explained by autism.[12] A formal diagnosis consistent with being on the autism spectrum was made only when Grandin was in her 40s.[citation needed] Grandin was later determined to be an autistic savant as well.[15][16][17][18]<\/p><\/div>\n
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