The Minds of Brilliant Mathematicians

A Sunday reflection from Kaja Perina in a piece on Alexander Grothendieck:

“The minds of brilliant mathematicians are of perennial fascination. But in the onrushing era of synthetic neurobiology and genomic reconfiguration, the possibility that genius and mental illness are intertwined takes on monumental significance. If scientists are eventually able to alter living brains or edit human embryos with an eye to mitigating conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, do we risk excising brilliant outliers from the gene pool? Isaac Newton, John Nash, and Alexander Grothendieck are low-frequency, high-impact minds; they advanced civilization in the domain on which they trained their high beams. It is worth turning the high beams of scientific inquiry on those same unusual minds.”