The Prodigy's Cousin (17 page)

That same year, Jourdan began an internship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a famed genetics and molecular biology research institution on Long Island. He came to the lab every week or two and spent a few hours shadowing Eric Drier, a postdoc studying memory. “I
really
wanted to work there. I was obsessed with Watson and Crick and DNA. I was a total fanboy,” Jourdan recalled.

Jourdan shadowed Eric through experiments. To keep up with what was going on at the lab, he taught himself high school biology, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry. Sometimes Eric gave Jourdan assignments to complete. At one point, the two investigated fruit flies and memory; as part of the experiment, the fruit flies were occasionally zapped with sixty volts of electricity. Jourdan felt bad for the flies and tested the grid out on himself.

Jourdan and Eric chatted while they worked. They covered everything from mutant fruit flies to synaptic plasticity to a science fiction book Jourdan had written. A persistent theme through all of their conversations was Jourdan's desire to have a positive impact on other
people. “He would talk about helping others pretty regularly,” Eric remembered. “I found it very heartwarming that he was concerned—very concerned—about helping out other people.”

At eleven, Jourdan made his Lincoln Center debut, performing as a soloist with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony. Much of his family came to watch, but one of Jourdan's cousins was missing from the audience. Jourdan soon learned that she had been diagnosed with rapidly progressive multiple sclerosis (MS).

Jourdan again responded with every resource he had. He gave concerts at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan and the Shubert in New Haven to benefit the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. He paired up with a faculty member at Stony Brook University School of Medicine and began studying myelin repair and other MS-related issues. At sixteen, he interned at a Harvard Medical School lab and worked on the genetics of multiple sclerosis. He eventually served as the keynote speaker at an MS event in Minneapolis and was featured at the Connecticut chapter of the National MS Society's Annual Meeting and Awards Ceremony.

Jourdan enrolled at Yale at seventeen. Within a few months of his arrival, he launched the International Coalition of College Philanthropists, an organization dedicated to supporting college students' fund-raising. “I wanted a platform that was totally clean for kids to be able to go out and fund raise against and then funnel into micro-finance projects, really simple stuff. Now it's common; at the time it wasn't,” Jourdan recalled.

The impetus for Jourdan's charitable work was almost always a personal encounter, but once he started fund-raising, he was intensely, thoroughly logical. The point was to generate as much money as possible and to get those funds to the organizations that would make the best use of the money. He kept the overhead for his own nonprofit at zero. By the time he was thirteen or fourteen, Jourdan was scrutinizing financial disclosure forms as he weighed various organizations interested in his benefit concerts. He grilled the organizations on
how they planned to use the money they received; he has a pet peeve about charitable organizations with bloat.

He used the media, too, to his benefit. He was often written up in magazines and newspapers and appeared on TV—all exposure that Jourdan believes amplified his philanthropic reach. “Those were all leverage for me when I was trying to recruit orchestras to work with me at no cost and all these other crazy asks I would make on people. I embraced the media because it gave me a microphone,” Jourdan said.

By the time Jourdan was nineteen, his nonprofit had raised $4.7 million. That money had provided twelve children with brain surgeries, a thousand cochlear implants for children who could not hear, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid for multiple sclerosis research and services; it helped fund pediatric clinics in El Salvador and Ghana and a music therapy program at the University of Michigan's C. S. Mott Children's Hospital.

Jourdan was named one of the top ten youth volunteers in the nation by the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, the
New York Post
awarded him a Young Heart Liberty Medal, and he received a National Caring Award and a World of Children Youth Award.
Teen People
named him one of Twenty Teens Who Will Change the World.

As a spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society once put it, Jourdan's work “
dramatically illustrated that a small hinge can swing large doors.”

Jourdan isn't the only prodigy with a mind oriented toward helping those around him. Many prodigies seem to need to do good in the same way they need to paint, perform, or calculate.

Jacob Komar was typing computer commands at two and studying computer manuals at five. He soon began writing code and dismantling and rebuilding old computers. When Jacob was nine, he acquired a heap of old computers headed for the trash from his
sister's school in Connecticut. He repaired the machines, and for about a year he refurbished roughly two computers each week. He coordinated with a local social services office to identify families who needed a computer and then delivered the machines personally.

Jacob's computer repair operation expanded. Eventually, he had more than two hundred computers waiting to be refurbished. They filled the Komars' garage; the family's cars had to be parked outside. Jacob enlisted help from friends, classmates, and strangers in his quest. People across the country who wanted to start similar programs contacted Jacob. He spoke with many of them and created a how-to manual to provide guidance for these groups. Jacob's nonprofit partnered with other organizations and won a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to teach junior high and high school students technology skills. He teamed up with the Cheshire Correctional Institution to teach prisoners how to refurbish computers in the prison repair shop.

In the meantime, he had been zipping through his own education. At sixteen, he graduated from the University of Hartford with a computer engineering degree. The following fall, he began a Ph.D. program at Brown University. A year after he completed his master's degree in electrical engineering, Jacob flew to Peru to set up a computer lab for the Sacred Valley Project, a nonprofit that helps educate girls in remote areas. A few months later, he flew back to help install solar panels in a rural community without electricity.

Other prodigies demonstrate the same extreme empathy. When visiting his father at the hospital, the child chef Greg Grossman was moved by the young cancer patients. He raised money to donate electronic games and movies to the children awaiting treatment. As his culinary reputation grew, he cooked for countless fund-raisers, hosted tasting tables at charity events, and regularly flew to Ohio to support Veggie U.

Lucie's son William was so troubled by the goal of dodgeball—to get other people “out”—that he always tried to get “out” himself
at the beginning of the game to avoid doing something unkind to another child.

Many of the prodigies seize any opportunity to use their special skills for the benefit of others; when faced with the plight of someone in need, they take the task upon themselves. It never seems to occur to them to wait for an adult to help.

The gulf between autism—as portrayed by the mind blindness theory—and prodigy seems vast. But the empathy gap may not be as large as it seems. There's another, newer theory of autism—the intense world theory—far removed from the deficit-focused orientation of the first generation of cognitive theories. It's built from the premise that perhaps the autistic brain isn't
less
of anything. Perhaps it's
more
.

In 2002, Tania Barkat was surrounded by rat brains.

The project she was working on had been suggested by her adviser, Henry Markram, a famous neuroscientist (he would later coordinate the
Human Brain Project, a hugely ambitious effort to build a working model of the brain) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Markram had begun reading about autism when his son was diagnosed with the condition. He had spent his career studying brain circuitry, and he wanted to investigate the autistic brain at the cellular level using an animal model—thus, Barkat's rats.

Barkat, who was then a Ph.D. candidate, exposed some of the rats prenatally to a chemical compound, valproic acid (VPA), that increases autism risk. She then carefully preserved and prepped rat brain slices so that she could stimulate the brain cells and measure the response. She wanted to compare the rats' brains and see if she could identify any abnormalities in the VPA-exposed rats' inhibitory cellular networks.

Barkat examined various layers of the brain; she looked at different classes of cells. But after two years on the project, everything in the VPA-exposed rats still looked normal. Markram thought they had exhausted the approach.

But Barkat wasn't ready to give up. One of her colleagues was studying excitatory cell networks, which gave her a new idea. Maybe the problem wasn't with the approach; maybe it was with the types of cells she had been targeting. She decided to switch from studying inhibitory networks to studying excitatory networks.

After Barkat changed tactics, she quickly began to see differences between the VPA-exposed rats and their typically developing counterparts. She and a group of fellow researchers set about trying to pinpoint exactly what those differences were.

It turned out that the brains of the VPA-exposed rats were “supercharged.” Their neurons generated many more connections to other neurons—more than 50 percent more—than those in the control rats' brains. When stimulated, the brains of the VPA-exposed rats reacted nearly twice as strongly as the brains of the control rats. The long-term impact of that stimulation was also much greater for the VPA rats: while both VPA and control brains demonstrated increased reactions to later stimuli, the increase in amplitude for the VPA brains was more than twice as large as that of the controls.

Through studies of live rats, the team discovered that their VPA rats had some unusual behaviors, too. They had overblown levels of anxiety and fear: they learned what to fear more quickly, generalized that fear more broadly, and were slower to release that fear than the control rats.

To investigate the roots of these behaviors, the scientists examined the rats' amygdalae. The amygdala consists of two relatively small, oval-shaped sets of neurons embedded deep within the back of the brain. It's considered mission control for fear; scientists believe that it's where we store our memories of fear and process threatening situations. After discovering the VPA rats' fear behaviors, the researchers investigated whether their amygdalae, too, were supercharged.

The answer was yes. The VPA rat amygdalae were more responsive to stimulation, and the effects of that stimulation were longer lasting.

From these findings, the intense world theory of autism was born. Henry Markram, his wife and fellow neuroscientist Kamila Markram, and Barkat proposed that the autistic brain's hyperactivity, its ability to form numerous, strong connections, results in heightened perception, attention, memory, and emotionality. These tendencies, the theory goes, could explain all facets of autism: Autists' withdrawal and repetitive behaviors might stem from their extreme sensitivity to stimulation, which might make some environments painfully intense. Autists' excellent attention to detail might be a by-product of heightened perception. Savant skills and exceptional memory might flow from the brains' ability to change and make new connections quickly.