Julian Lieb, M.D.

People ask: "Where are today's geniuses? Where are our Newtons, Beethovens,
Einsteins, Edisons, Picassos? Our Byrons, Mozarts, and Verdis? It is an interest-
ing question.Perhaps instant commercial success deprives some creative people
of motivation. Or might it be that our institutions, in the name of political cor-
rectness and in ignoring the adverse effects of academic tenure on the pursuit of
truth, suppress genius in the sciences, while overvaluing it in the field of enter-
tainment? One need go no further than to examine the intellectual achievements
of many who deliver commencement speeches at our colleges and universities for
insight into our values as the millennium draws to an end.

Warfare on a massive scale and genocide depleted the twentieth century of
legions of potential geniuses. How many of those who fell at the Somme, at
Tannenberg, at Verdun, on Guadalcanal, at Midway, on Iwo Jima, at Stalingrad,
or in the Sinai, or met their deaths over Hamburg or Berlin would, had they lived,
permanently enriched humankind? How many who would have followed in the
footsteps of Rubinstein, Horowitz, Oistrakh, Bernstein, Chaplin, Chagall, Sabin,
Salk, and Bohr, perished in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other concentration
camps? Will the England of Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Tennyson,
Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, Stevenson, and Churchill ever recover fully from
the dreadful drain on its manpower during two world wars? Drawing to a close is
a century in which paranoid tyrants in the USSR, Cambodia, and elsewhere made
the extinction of intellectuals a matter of state policy, an epoch in which a mon-
ster such as Josef Stalin thought nothing of murdering a Maxim Gorky.

This century has produced its geniuses, some in the arts and sciences, many in
the field of entertainment. Among the latter are: Irving Berlin, Alan Jay Lerner,
Frederick Loewe, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern,
Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Charles Mingus,

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