Your Chance to Meet a Genius.

There are some very special words in the English language--words with such powerful connotations that they immediately and uncontrollably evoke a strong reaction. I submit that one such word is genius. In this era of consumer advertising, image building, and media influence, when special words often are so overused that they become trivial echoes of formerly powerful expressions, I'm happy to say that genius has retained its power and impact.

I suspect one reason this word isn't used very often is simply that there aren't many geniuses out there. Think for a second. How many geniuses do you know? I know many very smart people, and many people whom I respect greatly for their intelligence. But geniuses?

To know a genius, one has to know what a genius is. My handy dictionary defines genius in terms of "exceptional intellectual and creative power." Hmmm. Something seems to be missing.

My personal view is that this definition doesn't begin to capture what we mean and feel when we speak the seldom-used word, genius.

Thus let me suggest a deeper sense of what we mean. I submit that a person who is to be called a genius must satisfy at least two criteria:

* A genius must be able to look at the same information that is available to all of us and then, despite enormous pressure to think otherwise, still somehow see things in that information that no one else can see.

* A genius must have tremendous courage to overcome the pressure to conform to conventional thinking and share newfound insights and new understandings with others.

In other words, there is more to being a genius than intellectual capacity. A genius also must have the courage to tell others what he or she sees. Otherwise new understandings and new insights have no meaning--no one will ever know about them.

The editors of Time magazine recently used the concept of genius in profiling Albert Einstein for their person-of-the-century issue. Following are some passages that caught my attention:

* "Among 20th-century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition, and imagination which are rarely combined in one mind, but which, when they do occur together, men call genius."

* "Einstein's theory of relativity not only upended physics, it also jangled the underpinnings of society. Now came a new view of the universe in which space and time were all relative. Indirectly, relativity paved the way for a new relativism in morality arts and politics. There was less faith in absolutes."

* Yet he [Einstein] was unfathomably profound--the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed."

* "To the world at large, relativity seemed to pull the rug out from under perceived reality."

A theme or two can be extracted from these observations. The obvious theme is that a genius can see through the assumptions of the world to a completely different world. The less obvious but even more telling theme is that this kind of vision sets into motion astounding changes in how we perceive reality, what is possible, and even what we believe in.

To originate changes of such profound magnitude has to be an experience that is lonely, scary, and intimidating. Can any of us possibly imagine the angst that an Einstein or a Galileo or a Martin Luther must have gone through in deciding whether to share revolutionary ideas in the face of enormous pressure to think otherwise?

Einstein fudged his equations with a mythical cosmological constant to avoid the implications of his own work--a suggestion that the universe wasn't static and unchanging--which contradicted his own beliefs as well as the conventional wisdom of his time. And, as the Time article points out, Einstein's ideas elicited ridicule, even from his professional peers--a pressure that could not have been easy to live with:

At first, even many scientists didn't grasp relativity, prompting Arthur Eddington's celebrated wisecrack (asked if it were true that only three people understood relativity, the witty British astrophysicist paused, and then said, "I am trying to think who the third person is").

In sum, a genius is a special person indeed--to be admired for courage as well as for intellect. But I suspect most NEHA members would agree. So why have I written at such length on the topic?

Remember when I asked how many NEHA members have met a genius? To help, I then attempted to define the term so that we could all better appreciate the rarity of finding such a person.

Well [ldots] the good news is that NEHA has precisely such a person in store for our members to meet at this year's AEC. Dr. Michael Fox is, in my humble opinion, a genius. He will be one of our keynote speakers, along with (we hope) the Surgeon General of the United States.

Dr. Fox has looked at an exceedingly complicated issue. It is arguably the most important issue our profession has faced--the issue of biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Unlike anyone I know or have read, Dr. Fox has taken the hugely varied aspects of this issue--ranging from the ecological to the biological, scientific, political, economic, and even theological--and has woven everything together into a comprehensible whole. I respect that many people understand one or more of these aspects on their own. To my knowledge, however, no one else has been able to take these disparate strands and weave them into a marvelous and masterful understanding of all that biotechnology involves--including its potential impact on life as we know it into the future.

I will never meet Einstein or even anyone close to his stature. On the other hand, I am extremely excited about the opportunity to meet a genius in our field--who, despite pressure to conform to prevalent thinking about the benefits of biotechnology, has articulated an understanding of this issue that has the potential to change its future direction.

I hope that you will be able to join with us at our special millennium conference this year and, among other things, meet a genius. It promises to be an experience that you will long remember. Never before have we had such an incredible slate for our keynote presentations. Never again will we have a year 2000 millennium conference! Never again (or at least never in my lifetime) are we likely to face an environmental health issue of such significance.