The Genius And The Nut

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

You open the jar marked 'Henry Cavendish' and hold his wet brain in your hands. Cavendish was a distinguished 18th-century scientist who made important discoveries in chemistry, electricity, and physics, but he was so shy that he ordered his female servants to remain out of sight or be fired. And to ensure his privacy, he developed an elaborate communication system of letter boxes and double doors in his house.

You poke your finger into his spongy, convoluted fissures. Cavendish never loved; nor was he fully human in many other ways. If a drug could have increased his love and decreased his shyness, who knows what experiments he would have failed to conduct? Instead, he could have lived his wealthy life in marital bliss in a lavish castle with little time or will to carry out demanding, exacting experiments. If Anafranil, an antidepressant that curbs obsessive-compulsive tendencies, had been available in the 1700s, would the state of modern science be retarded a hundred years? Or would pharmaceutical inhibitors have freed all these geniuses from the prison of their minds, allowing them to soar to new heights? How will future scientific development be affected when the obsessive-compulsive geniuses are eliminated from the world? Will we have made the individual happier at the expense of the planet?

On your way out, you return Cavendish's brain to the shelf, pop a few Anafranils into your mouth, and lock the door. On the front of the museum, engraved on an oak plank, is a motto from an obscure 20th-century eccentric: 'Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.

Adapted from Strange Brains and Genius (Plenum, 1998).

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print