Genius

Gerolamo Cardano

From Cardano’s Probability to Descartes’ Reason and Einstein’s Relativity to Benedict Arnold’s Treason all show the flashes of brilliance in thought and action. All lay bare the germs of intelligence. All for purposes of intellectual perpetuity dispose off the limits imposed on the human mind and derive the answers to the most difficult of all questions. Yet one of the four in conflict of thought placing self above country chose the path to infamy.

Intelligence is the harbinger of time, dedication and tedium. Is one born with it, maybe but more often than not it is bred, slowly and painfully climbing one rung on a tall ladder. Most geniuses live quiet detached lives with unfulfilled selfish dreams. They remain focused on the task navigating through bifurcating paths in the jungle where every visual is obstructed by the thicket. It is like the prince cutting and chopping his way through the forest to gain sight of his beloved Snow White. The common thread that weaves trough the fabric of their genius is desire; planted or acquired.

The Forest For the Trees

The probability of throwing a heads or tails in thousands of coin tosses yields a picture of unprejudiced conformity to equality by invoking the laws of large numbers. It does not beckon the true reality of a single event. Thus card counting can over time yield great dividends in a casino but the casino managers will probably show the boot before any losses are incurred to the establishment. The principle of probability is the determination of chance, but when the butterfly flutters its wings over the Pacific Ocean and a violent thunderstorm erupts over the Atlantic Ocean then the human capacity or that of the largest computing machine devised by the human mind is incapable of prediction.

A simple flowing thought of reason can establish the correlates of human endeavor. Yet reason alone makes the world a blank, white void of calculable action, devoid of the greatest of all human intellect called variety. The spice of life when suppressed in the pure act of reason will cause decay in the sensibility of life. A humdrum. Mechanistic and boring. Descartes’ two hundred years of Reason led to the most artless of arts by the conformists of his time until challenges from the likes of Wordsworth to regain the beauty and range of language. Reason alone does not satiate the soul.

Relativity of things that tug and push each other by the governs of gravity in a space dark and filled with matter that cannot be seen was a thought experiment gone wild with ideas that led Einstein to mathematically prove his laws of relativity. The actual proof came years later by actual experimentation. Einstein’s acquired skills as a clerk in the patent office helped formulate his future. Spending his days formulating theoretical physics and unbeknownst to him creating branches of new fields from relativistic cosmology to explaining the inexplicable quantum physics with matters such as the Bose Einstein Condensates. All things relative reside in the cosmos, each in relative push and pull of the other as things and people on earth.

Treason is the inglorious act of self against the State. Many have been charged across the world. Treason has been used as a subterfuge from religious persecution of Galileo to Henry the VIII decree against Ann Boleyn to ultimately the establishment of a universal code of conduct to prevent such salacious events. True treason is a crime against the State and thus placing the lives of humanity in jeopardy. Some treasonous acts in the yesterdays of time were nothing other than the expression of an intellectual thought. Nowadays however it is a defined category of an act of sedition and proven with factual evidence, mostly from the minds of evil intellectuals.

Yet there is this innate thing that is inherent in some lucky ones that overflows as brilliance without a formal training or extraordinary insights derived from studies that flickers the flame of genius into existence. A short lived phenom named Sirinavasi Ramanujan who died at the age of 32 from Amoebiasis had gathered mathematical treatises and collated them in his repertoire by the age of 13 and created formulas that echoed all the way to England eventually earning him a Bachelors degree later termed a PhD in mathematics and a Fellowship at the Royal Trinity College at Cambridge. From such humble beginnings as poverty and starvation to renowned remembrances as a great mathematician lies the seed of a born genius.

Sirinavasi Ramnujan

And then there is the case of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a child prodigy who at the age of five composed music and performed shortly thereafter for Royalty in Salzburg, and became well known throughout Europe. His masterpiece the undulating Requiem has given respite to millions if not billions set of ears. Dying at an early age of 35 as most prodigiously talented geniuses do and depriving the world of greater works. He left humanity with the lingering lust for music that could have been.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“And what of the conference? What did you think?” She asked in her quiet way. Her twenty-something fingers with chewed down fingernails to their beds waved nonchalantly in the air. “What did you think?” She repeated like an echo.
“Okay I thought. No earth shattering information this year.”
“You think?” Incredulous in her accented question.
“Why did you think there was something earth shattering?”
“Yes, I do.” The words were expressed plain and simple and without fanfare. It was like a factual slap in the face.
“Tell me then.”
“We all talk about causation of cancer. Many theories abound but all eventually take the final common pathway of gene mutation, suppression of the suppressors or enhancement of the promoters. Nothing short of cause and effect suits us. But ever think about the inflammatory causes of cancer?” Here she paused a bit, reflecting and pretending to hear a question like, “What’s that all about?”
“Anyway,” not hearing a response she preceded her monologue, “If you dig deep you’ll find that more cancers have a foundation in inflammation then any thing else. And what causes inflammation?” No answer was needed to this since she didn’t even take a breath after the question, “Of course infection is one of the main causes. Okay lets look at gallbladder cancer for instance most of the time is preceded by chronic inflammations from stones/infective episodes etc. Now proceed on to the gastric cancer and there is link to Helicobacter Pylori and move on to cervical cancer in females and you have the Human Papiloma Virus initiating the problem. And if you take the bigger killers like Prostate and colon cancer the former has a viral linkage and the latter has the antigen for EColi present in the cancer specimens and now they tell us that the bacterium Bacteroides Fragilis if present in the cancer specimen leads to a poor prognosis stage for stage.” She fell quiet a moment flipping her hair away from her face.

“If this is the main cause how come we can’t find 100% causation for most every malignancy?”
“Here are some other causes, a long acting immunogenic stimulus can lead to Lymphomas and other lympho-proliferative disorders. Low grade collagen vascular diseases like Lupus and Sjogren’s have a higher relationship with Lymphomas don’t they?”
“True.”
“Incidentally a chronic tonsillitis can also cause tonsillar lymphoma as well as Hashimotos Thyroiditis can lead to an aggressive Lymphoma originating in the thyroid.” She wasn’t quite done yet, because when she became still with nary a muscle flexion her brain was flexing neuronal power.
“What about denovo malignancies in children?”
“Pure genetic aberrations at birth. The right set came assembled as the wrong set.” She answered without even looking up from her thoughts. She was listening while wrapped up in her thoughts. “All we have to do is start looking for the errant infective or inflaming agent.”
“So you surmise that all malignancies have a common infectious etiology?”
“Not all but most!”

She left for her research residency in Molecular Biology of Cancer at a very prestigious university. Her brilliance and logic was inescapable and true. She remains far and away ahead of her peers. She is quietly motivated to excel in her thinking. Her dreams and desires do not reflect the common person her age. Her thoughts do not match those of her peers. Her profession yearns for people like her so few and far between. She is the intellect. She will create a wealth of knowledge and be the proximate cause of newer paradigms. Things that mere mortals in medicine fail to grasp will fall in her lap. Hers is the kingdom of new discoveries, the ocean of truth laid bare to the open, inquisitive, intelligent mind of this young genius.