What Is Genius Made Of?

When physicist Michio Kaku hits a wall in his research on string
theory, he straps on a pair of ice skates and heads out onto a New York City rink.

The cocreator of string theory twirls around and around and
around. "Once I'm on the ice, it's just me and Isaac Newton," says Kaku, a professor at the City University of New York.

Filmmaker Michael Apted borrows Kaku's quirky comment for the title of his charming, poetic new film on how scientists create. Me & Isaac Newton, which opens in theaters this month and screens on HBO in January, is not your ordinary sober-minded appreciation of eggheads at work.

It's a surprisingly moving film that limns the whimsical, often playful
process that produces life-changing scientific discoveries.

Kaku shares the screen with six other scientists, including Nobel Prize
winner Gertrude Elion, 82, a prolific chemist who developed new drugs for the treatment of acute leukemia (Elion, sadly, died while the film was being made); primatologist Patricia Wright, 56, who discovered a new species of Malagasy lemur; and environmental scientist Ashok Gadgil, who invented an affordable way for people in the developing world to purify water.

If you think that great scientists are the grown-up versions of the
pocket-protector types you secretly reviled in high school, this movie is here to prove you wrong.

Computer scientist Maja Mataric, whose research was used in the Sojourner robot that went to Mars in 1997,  confesses that what she really wanted to do was design shoes.

Studying artificial intelligence at MIT was her fallback plan.

Primatologist Wright was a hard-partying girl in her 20s when she first got interested in science one New York night: She stumbled into a pet shop across from the renowned rock music venue Filmore East and bought a pet monkey.

British-born Apted, 59, has had an uneven career in commercial films over the years, including 1988's Gorillas in the Mistand last year's Bond thriller, The World Is Not Enough.

His passion is making small, finely crafted works of cinematic anthropology. Best known is his award-winning 7 Up series of documentaries about a group of Britons he started filming in 1963 and has revisited every seven years.

Me & Isaac Newton shares some of that series' style: Characters talk plainly to the camera about their desires, disappointments and motivations.

The idea for this unusual film came from billionaire Paul Allen, whose independent film production company, Clear Blue Sky, supplied the $1.5 million budget.

Allen also produced a 1997 Apted film, Inspirations, about creativity in the arts.

As it happens, the two endeavors--science and art--are a lot more alike
than you might think. Sure, there's a lot of dogged scribbling involved, but in the end, the scientist, like the poet or the painter, often spreads his wings, says a silent prayer, and ... jumps.

Says Kaku, "Unless we're willing to leap into the unknown, we won't get anywhere at all."

[Forbes Magazine, 11.13.00]

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