SCENE COVER
The nature of genius 10.09.09
Every so often, even at a place like Yale, we are reminded that some people are smarter than others. Someone, like Thomas Steitz — a Sterling professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and, as of Wednesday, the winner of a Nobel Prize for Chemistry — will come along and make us wonder what makes these people different from the rest of us. Some people call them “geniuses.” But genius is just a label — a word for people who seem to have a natural talent for one thing or another, such as learning birdsong, investigating why elderly people fall or crystallizing cellular organelles smaller than we could even imagine. “Genius is a useful human construct,” said music professor Craig Wright, who has taught the freshman seminar “Exploring the Nature of Genius” for three years. “It’s just an idea like justice or liberty.”
