Genius and Madness

The link between genius and madness has been explored by many authors, playwrights and filmmakers. The cliché of the "mad scientist" has become so commonplace in our society that it is often one's primary association to the term "scientist." One pictures a benign, be-spectacled man with a shock of white hair ala Einstein. Albert Einstein has come to symbolize this visual cliché of the mad scientist despite the fact that he was not himself mad. As the most famous scientist in the world, he is simply the first image to come to mind, although there is little doubt that he was eccentric. In addition, he is an appropriate symbol because madness did seem to run in his veins; Einstein's son spent the majority of his adult life consigned to an insane asylum. His story, then, is one example of the genetic association of genius...