Genius children have been known throughout the centuries and studied by many eminent people. Unfortunately, there seems to be little agreement on either side as to whether the child has inherited her brain power or perhaps acquired it through a fortuitous developmental factor at birth.
One American response was to use child prodigies in an experiment using the Nobel Sperm Bank in Escondido, California, which was founded by an eccentric elderly millionaire, Robert Graham. The sole aim was to provide intelligent women, who wanted to be mothers of superior babies, with the sperm of Nobel Prize winners. The experiment was intended to dramatically increase the number of gifted children for future generations.
Afton Blake’s baby became the first deliberately conceived genius and was born in 1982. Afton was a single psychologist and chose her baby’s father from a portfolio, which listed the donor as having good physical appearance and a high level of intelligence. The anonymous donor, identified only by a number, was also a donor
computer scientist and an accomplished musician. Her mother named the baby ‘Doron’, being an anagram for ‘donor’. The psychologists evaluated the baby at 4 months and declared that he had an IQ of 200. At 2 years old, Doron was developing faster than his peers.
Does this mean something?
Well, maybe not when you consider the number of genius children born to parents of normal or subnormal intelligence. A good example is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was born in 1756. Although his father was a moderately good violinist, young Wolfgang outshone him almost as soon as he could walk. At the age of 3 he taught himself to play chords on the harpsichord, and by age 5 he was composing music. By the age of 6 he had mastered musical notation and a year later he performed before the Emperor of Austria in Vienna.
The boy genius, Andragone de Mello, was born in 1977. He became the youngest person to graduate from an American university, when at the age of 11 he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of California. The boy amazed his parents by saying ‘hello’, when he was just 7 weeks old. At two and a half years old he was playing chess and solving geometry problems. At age 4 he was studying Greek, physics and philosophy. When he was 8 years old, he could write complex computer programs. His father was a flamenco guitarist.
George Bernard Shaw had no doubts about the futility of genetic selection. The grey-haired, bearded playwright was approached by a beautiful young actress who suggested that with her brains and her beauty, she could produce a ‘child prodigy’ to amaze the world. He wrote to her, saying politely: ‘But alas, madam, what if the child inherits my looks and her brains!’