The top of my list would be:
- to finance the creation of high-resolution (down to 1 micron x 1 micron x 1 micron) tomograph. Estimate cost $1B
It would allow the detection and measurement of the brain's morphological structures and asses the mental capacity and predisposition of humans. That would allow us to find potential geniuses in their early years. This method has being developed by professor Sergey Saveliev and the school he belongs to.
Sergey Vyacheslavovich Savelyev - Wikipedia
Interesting biology on Savelyev and his work. A question which always amused me, "What is genius and how is it determined"? Are you born with certain potential attributes or latent talents that need certain or pacific environmental conditions to develop? Is it all genetics?
Considering the history of academic testing, Savelyev's work has the potential of being a milestone.
Is High Intelligence Necessary to be a Genius? (Edison and Einstein differed on intelligence testing)
Is High Intelligence Necessary to be a Genius?
Excerpt: Unfortunately, there is not much quantitative information available on the
intelligence of exceptionally creative people, for fairly obvious reasons. In the first place,
intelligence testing began only in the first decade of the 20th century, with the psychologist Alfred Binet testing for mental retardation in French primary schools. It did not become widespread until the 1920s, in North America.
So there are effectively no numerical data for anyone born before the 20th century.
Secondly, its use in all cultures has been controversial, and far from universal, even in the country where it is most common, the United States.
Moreover, the results of different intelligence tests taken during different periods, especially if they were devised in different cultures, are tricky to compare with each other.
Thirdly, tests are generally carried out in youth, but since that is before exceptional creativity reveals itself, educational psychologists will not always spot the potential of a future genius and administer a test.
Finally, one suspects that
very few of those recognized as a genius would be willing to sit for a standard intelligence test.
The chief difficulty in correlating intelligence with exceptional creativity and genius is that while psychologists may be able to measure intelligence, ever since Francis Galton's day
they have been unable to agree on even an approximate definition.
‘Innumerable tests are available for measuring intelligence, yet no one is quite certain of what intelligence is, or even of just what it is that the available tests are measuring', admitted Robert Sternberg, in 1987. According to James Flynn, writing in 2007, ‘We have to realise that intelligence can act like a highly correlated set of abilities on one level and like a set of functionally independent abilities on other levels.'
In the mid-1980s, Flynn discovered an astonishing and subversive fact about mean IQ figures.
In the post-war decades, mean IQ trended steadily upwards, not just in one or two countries but in all developed countries where sufficient IQ data were available. Over the second half of the century, some two generations, mean IQ grew by almost 20 points in the United States and Europe. Other, less reliable, data suggested that the growth went back to 1900, and that the mean IQ in 1900, scored against current norms, would have been somewhere between 50 and 70.
The debate about the relationship between high intelligence and exceptional creativity continues to churn.
Cox's Study of 300 (301) Eminent Geniuses born from 1450 to 1850, including Flynn Effect Calculations, listed alphabetically and by descending IQ
Cox's IQ Estimates of 301 Eminent Geniuses born from 1450 to 1850
Top 12 People with Highest IQ in the World
Top 12 People with Highest IQ in the World - Listovative
